


Death in the Smell of Spring

by pretentiousashell, venndaai



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anxiety, Canonical Character Death (Not Hugh), Drama!!, Even Chapters Are Mirror Mylvia, Everyone Is In Love With Michael And That's Just The Way It Is, F/F, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Family Drama, Happy Ending, Mirror Michael Is The Mysterious Dangerous Leather Jacket Loner Of Our Dreams, Mirror Universe, Odd Chapters Are Prime Mylvia, POV Alternating, Politics, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pseudo Science, Secrets, Undercover, Xenophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-07 17:46:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14676231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pretentiousashell/pseuds/pretentiousashell, https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: He looked up at her. “So, you and Tilly—”“No,” Michael said quickly—too quickly. She cleared her throat, irritated with herself. “This was an unexpected variable.”“I guess you could put it like that,” he agreed neutrally, gaze carefully blank.An AU in which Michael and Sylvia arrive in the Mirror Universe only to discover that their counterparts are married.





	1. Part 1.0: Monkey's Paw

**Author's Note:**

> This is my contribution for the Star Trek Reverse Big Bang, which was a delight to participate in! Y'all can check out the other fantastic artwork and fanfics by checking out the collection on ao3. I had the privilege of working with the extraordinarily talented venndaai, whose gorgeous art launched a thousand ideas. Big thanks to the RBB's diligent moderators, and a huge shout-out to ThatAloneOne/writerproblem193 for being a wonderful beta.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've messed around with canon a bit in this fic. It diverges right when they jump to the Mirror Universe, and pretty much everything should be the same prior to that. However, I did change a bunch about the Mirror Universe for the purposes of the story, so don't assume things are the same there as they were in the show. It should all be explained eventually.
> 
> Anywho I hope you enjoy the story peace out.

 

> “There’s a stench in the air, which, from this distance underground, might be the smell either of death or of spring—I hope spring. But don’t let me trick you, there _is_ death in the smell of spring and in the smell of thee as in the smell of me.”
> 
> Ralph Ellison, _Invisible Man_

* * *

* * *

“How’s the research coming?” Lorca asked, his quiet drawl jolting Michael out of the intense focus she’d kept for the past—she checked her chronometer—six hours.

“The Terran Empire does not make it easy,” she replied on a frustrated sigh, rubbing her eyes.

Frowning, Lorca approached her work station, glancing down at the rows and rows of text currently on eight PADDs laid out neatly before her. “What’ve you got for me?”

Michael straightened, mentally organizing the intel she’d gathered before saying, “The reports on you were the easiest—you were publicly executed after being hunted down by my counterpart for treason. You were a radical authoritarian—even more radical than the current Emperor—and disappeared for several years before resurfacing in the past month.”

“Jesus,” Lorca muttered.

“I am compiling brief profiles on the biographies of the rest of the crew.”

“Anything particularly significant?”

Michael took a fortifying breath. “Cadet Tilly captains the _Discovery_ here.”

Lorca blinked once, evidently stunned. “ _Our_ Cadet Tilly?”

“Yes.”

“ _Jesus_.”

“There are several crewmembers stationed on different ships, so we should keep their presence more underground in case of interaction with other Terrans, myself included.”

“What ship are you on?”

“I captain the _Shenzhou_ ,” Michael said, keeping her voice very carefully even. She was not ready to think about what she felt about _that_. “I will send you the list.”

“Please do.” He ran a wary hand through his hair. “I’ve gotta talk to Tilly.”

Michael looked down at the PADD currently displaying Tilly’s formidable accomplishments in the Terran universe. She had gotten halfway through the list before feeling too sick to continue and had carefully set that research aside. “Anything else, sir?”

“Grab someone to help you out,” Lorca said. “I know you can do this all on your own, but you really don’t have to.”

Michael stared at him for a moment, uncomprehending. “Okay,” she finally said. The Captain was acting strangely, although Michael could not put her finger on what exactly made her think so.

He hesitated before leaving, mouth twisting into something rueful. Michael tried to disregard his strangeness for now. She had a much more pressing task at hand.

Lorca’s intrusion brought this universe’s Tilly back to the forefront of her mind, but she ignored the urgency of examining that particular PADD as a few crewmates she did not recognize stepped into the room. Michael stood to greet them.

“Captain Lorca sent us here to help you out,” one of them said.

“Thank you. I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. I’m—”

“We know,” another one said wryly.

“Right.”

There was an awkward beat before Michael gestured to the neat clutter of PADDs laid out. “Feel free to take one and begin compiling profiles for our personnel. Brevity is optimal—we need the bare minimum on everyone as soon as possible.”

They got to work quickly, and Michael resumed scanning through databases for familiar names.

A half hour later, one of her team—his name was Randy, if Michael’s memory served—absently reached for the PADD with Tilly’s information, and Michael snatched it from him before conscious thought registered.

They stared at each other for a moment, Michael feeling _wrong_ and agitated. “Sorry, Lieutenant. I was using that one.”

“No worries,” Randy said hesitantly, reaching for another PADD at random.

Michael inhaled evenly. She supposed there was nothing for it, now. She would have to finish reading.

She did not care to deeply analyze her reaction to such information. When reading her own counterpart’s impressive list of bloody accomplishments, Michael had only felt vaguely rueful. As she stared at the words _10 million lives lost_ —the result of Tilly’s actions—she felt the powerful urge to run for Tilly, grab her by the shoulders, and hide her in Stamets’ garden until this whole thing was over.

Michael took a deep breath and cleared her mind, trying to find the calm that she had lost so long ago.

**After such an accomplishment, Tilly, then Commander of the _ISS Discovery_ , mutinied against her current Captain. She has held command ever since.**

**Captain Tilly married Captain Michael Burnham of the _ISS Shenzhou_ in a—**

Michael stopped reading.

She looked up from the PADD, feeling strangely dazed. She glanced around the room. No one payed her attention. They continued reading and jotting down notes as if the world was exactly the same as it had been ten seconds ago.

Randy happened to glance up at her, and he frowned. “Are you—”

Michael stood up. “I need to…” she trailed off, unsure what she would have said.

The others were pausing to observe whatever the hell was happening. Michael distantly reflected that she was not making a favorable impression.

She very gently tucked the PADD under her arm and backed away from her table.

Michael didn’t know where she would have gone if no one had intercepted her, but as she stopped in the hallway outside for a confused moment, Randy approached her cautiously. “Is everything okay?” he asked.

Turning to face him, Michael hoped her expression was composed. “Some…new information.”

Randy arched an eyebrow.

Struck dumb, she passed him the PADD and gestured for him to read after he hesitated.

His eyebrows climbed higher and higher on his forehead as he read, but Michael knew he had reached the point of exceptional interest when he paused, jaw going slack.

He looked up at her. “So, you and Tilly—”

“No,” Michael said quickly—too quickly. She cleared her throat, irritated with herself. “This was an unexpected variable.”

“I guess you could put it like that,” Randy agreed neutrally, gaze carefully blank.

Michael nodded, satisfied with the terminology. “I need to inform her.”

When she didn’t move for a long moment, Randy said, “Do you…want me to tell her?”

That would be an illogical waste of resources, Michael thought, but then she imagined approaching Tilly and watching her react to it all, and she said, “Just come with me,” without consciously deciding that this was what she wanted.

Randy offered a sympathetic smile, but Michael looked away and started walking towards the Captain’s ready room with long, brisk strides. Randy scrambled to keep up.

“Just so you know, I’ve never really—uh—talked to Tilly. Sure, I’ve seen her around, but I don’t think she knows me, so—”

“Don’t worry,” Michael said, aware that she was being a hypocrite. “I will do the talking.”

“Then…why am I…?”

Michael looked at him out of the corner of his eye. He was frowning, and Michael wondered what he usually did on this ship instead of helping mutineers gather up the courage to have a slightly awkward conversation. “You’re here because it may be a two-person job.”

“What may be a two-person job?”

Michael swallowed roughly. “Getting her to believe me.”

Randy’s doubtful silence engulfed them, but Michael knew she was right. If she had told Tilly alone, she may assume it Michael’s attempt at human humor. She was just being practical.

They paused before the door before Michael tapped the button requesting entry. “Burnham,” she said. The door swished open immediately.

Tilly and Lorca stood by his desk, looking grave. Michael supposed that this was a grave situation. She switched the damning PADD to her other arm and tried to look calm and distant.

Randy shifted his weight next to her.

“Yes?” Lorca said after a pause too long.

“I found something relevant to Tilly.” She kept her gaze on the Captain, even though she knew it was cowardly of her.

“Well, get on with it.”

“Her counterpart evidently married this universe’s Michael Burnham.”

Lorca’s expression did something very strange, tightening in a spasm of pain and—was that _anger_? No, it couldn’t be. But it was the briefest twitch before his features smoothed out. “Well, I’ll be.”

Michael forced herself to look at Tilly. Her eyes were wide, and she opened her mouth soundlessly before closing it.

“Evidence,” Michael blurted out, feeling foolish as she passed the PADD to Randy, who thankfully carried it over to Tilly and Lorca.

“Thank you, you two. You’re dismissed,” Lorca said after staring at the article a beat too long.

Michael nodded. “Thank you, sir.” She couldn’t help but chance one last look at Tilly before turning around, but Tilly was still gazing at the PADD as if it was a gibberish line of code. Michael didn’t know what else she had expected.

As they exited, Randy said, “Oh, boy.”

“Lieutenant?”

“That was awkward as _hell_.”

Michael almost smiled. She settled for shaking her head once, and Randy laughed in breathy disbelief. “Let’s get back to work.”

“Thank god.”

 

* * *

 

 

The thing was, Tilly had been an unexpected variable from day one.

In her fierce desperation to keep her head down on the _Discovery_ ¸ Michael had approached everyone with caution, keeping interactions polite yet distant, saying the bare minimum, just doing her part. She had even been successful for a while there, but then came Tilly’s easy smile, and the way they naturally fell in-step with each other on the way to the mess hall, and the way Tilly whispered that she wanted to be _captain_ like it was something outrageous and forbidden, and the way that Michael startled awake at night to find Tilly snoring two meters away.

Michael had never had a friend before.

Philippa had been a mentor and a mother to her, but it wasn’t the same. In this life—the life _after_ her indictment—Tilly’s small secret kindness felt like the end to something that hadn’t even started.

Michael remembered being promoted to first officer on the _Shenzhou_ , not a stranger to the silence of her single quarters. She had sat on the floor that first night, trying to meditate, unable to calm the whirring insistence of her thoughts. There was a hand around her throat squeezing with the knowledge that she had no one with whom to share her fears.

It was a comfort on the prison colony, the vice around her throat tighter than ever. She was separate from the other inmates, only allowed time to walk around when everyone else was asleep. She would watch the distant dispassionate arcs of stars as she stood in the biting wind, fiercely grateful for her slow suffocation.

The thing about Sylvia Tilly was that she spoke as if she never had time to breathe, like her next breath would end her train of thought for good. There was a weight pressing down on Michael’s throat, and Tilly spoke as if she intimately understood that same weight.

The thing was, Michael didn’t think she would ever be ready to breathe again, and Tilly made her think that maybe one day she would have to change her mind.

 

* * *

 

“This was the craziest day of my life,” Tilly exclaimed as soon as the door to their quarters swished open, and Michael jolted in surprise, trying to pretend she hadn’t fumbled with her PADD as she did so. Tilly did not look at her as she collapsed onto her bed in a sprawl, the perfect antithesis to Michael’s neat position on her own bed with her legs folded and back straight.

“I can imagine,” Michael said dryly, searching Tilly’s face for any sign of a shift.

“I mean, I know I wanted to be a captain someday, but not like this. Did you read my biography?”

“Yes.”

“This is, like, the absolute worst way to grant my greatest wish. It’s like—like the monkey’s paw.”

Michael smiled slightly despite herself. “I find that I feel the same way regarding my own biography.”

Tilly perked up in attention. “What’s yours? The Captain had me so focused on my own that I didn’t even—sorry.”

Waving her apology away, Michael said, “I became the captain of the _Shenzhou_ with honors. I didn’t mutiny. I didn’t kill anyone for it. It was a simple, deserved promotion.”

Tilly frowned. “Uh—”

“This Burnham is expected to be the current Emperor’s successor. She has everything, and even something to lose.”

The reference to their counterparts’ marriage made Tilly drop into silence and look away. “I get it,” she whispered. Then, she brightened with forced cheer. “Really puts things into perspective, huh?”

“Indeed.”

Tilly shifted so that she was lying down, staring at the ceiling, arms flung carelessly around her. “What are you going to tell Ash?”

Michael mulled over this for a moment. She and Ash had certainly expressed mutual interest in pursuing a romantic relationship, but they had yet to take several necessary steps to its legitimization. They had made no promises to one another, but thinking about telling him _this_ felt like the mental equivalent of putting on a glove backwards and being unable to fix it.

Tilly was looking at her out of the corner of her eye, careful.

“The truth,” Michael finally said. It was a noncommittal answer, and she knew it wasn’t the information Tilly had been seeking, but she accepted it nonetheless. The phantom pressure on Michael’s windpipe increased.

“Hopefully, we won’t be here too long anyway! I heard that the engineers have been literally working non-stop since we got here. Apparently, Lieutenant Sha’lo literally passed out on the warp drive controls, and Commander Pora _woke them up_ and just told them to get some coffee and keep working.”

Michael frowned. “That is unhealthy and reckless but also unsurprising.”

“ _And_ the science department has a nap rotation going on twenty-minute shifts! It’s insane. I wish I could be a part of it.”

“Me too,” Michael said honestly. They had both been isolated from their passions, Michael supposed. Tilly couldn’t work with the engineers because of her impromptu captaincy, and Michael couldn’t _really_ join the scientists because of her indictment. She was grateful enough to spearhead the research on the crews’ biographies.

“Anyway, we’re the best science vessel in the fleet. We’ll get home soon.”

Michael glanced at her PADD, displaying an article detailing the numerous impossibilities regarding interdimensional travel. “Of course,” she agreed hollowly, grieving her lost belief for the impossible.

 

* * *

 

 

Maybe it was just that—maybe Tilly’s idealism made Michael ache for the past. Maybe her ceaseless pursuit of things that should not be possible merely made Michael nostalgic.

But Michael knew this to be false.

 

* * *

 

 

“Now, I can’t seem to find records of you anywhere,” Michael continued, forcing herself to maintain eye contact with Ash. “It’s as if you don’t exist at all.”

“Figures,” Ash said, smiling ruefully. “Can you hack my existence into the system?”

“The Terran security system is excellent. I would require the help of a professional computer technician, and they are all busy with the ship right now,” Michael said after a pause. “I will try my best.”

“Great. Thank you, Michael.”

There was a moment where neither of them said anything, and Michael dug her fingernails into her palms underneath the table where she sat. “You’re a good man, Ash.”

Ash opened his mouth, then seemed to think better of whatever he was going to say and closed it. “Thank you.”

“My counterpart is married to Cadet Tilly’s counterpart in this universe,” she said bluntly.

Blinking once, Ash dropped into silence for a long moment. “I didn’t know you two…”

“Their reality is not representative of our own,” Michael cut in softly. She needed him to understand this. Her chest ached with it.

Ash leaned against the closest structure—a wall—and offered a sad, kind smile. “Michael, I like you. I _really_ like you, and I will be here for you in whatever capacity you want me. This doesn’t have to be a love story.”

Michael stared at him for a long moment. “I don’t know what I want,” she said honestly.

“Let me do this for you,” he whispered, pushing off the wall and dropping into the chair on the other side of the table, leaning into her space. Michael’s pulse quickened. “Let me be your friend, for now. You don’t have to have everything figured out.”

Michael kind of begged to differ on that last point, but she didn’t comment on it. “I want you in my life. I know that much.”

Ash’s smile softened. “That’s all I can really ask.” He touched her wrist, briefly. “We don’t have to be anything we don’t want to be.”

“Yes,” Michael agreed faintly. He was right. This thing between them could wait. “I value our relationship,” she added, just to make sure that he knew this.

“I do too. In _whatever_ capacity.”

“Thank you, Ash.”

“Of course.” He stood. “If you need my help with anything, I’m just a comm call away. I’ll be helping with the redesign in the meantime.”

“Good luck.”

Ash saluted.

 

* * *

 

 

The crew’s anxiety skyrocketed the longer they wandered aimlessly through space without incident or any communication at all from the Terran Empire or its numerous enemies. It became such a brittle atmosphere that when Michael briefed Saru on their functionally complete biographies, he only offered sharp, brief responses.

Finally, Michael said, “Have you eaten today, Commander?” and Saru snapped, “That, Specialist, is _not_ your jurisdiction. Please, go and do something _useful_.”

Michael scowled and silently left the bridge, mechanically shuffling her two PADDs—one displayed the biographies, and the other was a proposal to help the science officers, but she and Saru hadn’t gotten that far. She supposed his curt dismissal could be vaguely considered some sort of approval, but she didn’t want to add fuel to the fire that she was rash and untrustworthy.

She had to get a handle on her nerves. She forced herself to walk even paces and breathe through her nose, carefully counting her footsteps until the drum of her heartbeat wasn’t so damn loud in her ears.

“Hey, Michael,” Ash called, and Michael turned to watch him jog to catch up with her.

“Ash,” she returned quietly, falling into step with him. “Everything okay?”

Ash nodded distractedly, but Michael noticed the dark circles under his eyes and the tight pull of his mouth. He seemed even more tense than Saru. “I feel kinda under the weather, actually,” he said, tone carefully light. “Could you come with me to see Doctor Culber?”

“Of course.” She was instantly relieved for the distraction from her own place on this ship, but quickly became concerned for Ash’s. She opened her mouth to ask more questions, but Ash’s glazed eyes and twitching hands told her that perhaps she could wait a moment.

Entering sickbay was another level of demoralizing energy. Inside, only two patients occupied the biobeds. The first was an engineer who passed out from dehydration. Michael had heard about this from Randy, who had turned out to be a bit of a gossip. (She privately thought that Tilly would enjoy his conversation.) The second was Paul Stamets.

Paul’s eyes were glossy in such a way that Michael was reminded of the story of the Snow Queen, in which a boy caught shards of magic shards of glass in his eyes, turning him cruel, borderline violent, and totally unlike himself. The only way he returned to his normal state was by crying.

Michael stared at him for a long time, recalling him as he had been before all of this started, dreadfully grumpy but unerringly passionate. Not for the first time, she considered the evils of the spore drive, remembering Ripper and how tirelessly she worked to save the tardigrade before Paul damned himself.

She let out a shaky breath.

As opposed to the rest of the ship and its subdued but urgent tone, the sickbay held the air of grief, as if Paul (and their hopes of returning to their universe) had already died.

On top of her low thrum of anxiety, Michael’s gut twisted in a painful stab of anguish.

“Michael?”

Hugh’s voice startled Michael out of her dark reverie, and she turned to face the doctor, noting that he looked almost as terrible as Ash. “Hi, Hugh.”

They didn’t exchange condolences. Nothing had been lost yet.

“Everything alright, or are you just stopping by for a visit?” He smiled a little bit, wry.

“Lieutenant Tyler is experiencing some sort of intense strain,” she supplied vaguely.

They both turned to look at Ash, and he blinked lethargically as if only just realizing they had arrived at his destination. “I think something’s wrong with me,” he said hoarsely, an undercurrent of panic providing a rough edge to his words.

Instantly, Hugh’s friendly demeanor collapsed into professionalism, and he guided Ash to lay down on a biobed. “I’m gonna run some preliminary scans. Why don’t you tell me about your symptoms?”

Ash took a shaky breath and quietly described lapses in awareness, hallucinations, and, almost as an afterthought, nightmares.

Hugh and Michael exchanged carefully neutral glances.

Michael was no stranger to Ash’s PTSD, but there was something else going on here.

She tried to concentrate on alternating between being helpful to Hugh when nurses rushed out to deal with minor injuries outside of sickbay and reading relevant scholarly articles on her PADD. By the time Hugh rocked back on his heels, his expression more blank than Sarek’s on a good day, Michael was counting the beeps of the biobed.

“This should be impossible,” he said.

“I’m not a Klingon,” Ash said weakly once Hugh explained his theory.

The silence that followed was telling, and Ash’s shoulders hunched. He tucked his chin into his chest, looking smaller than Michael had ever seen him. She felt like the air had been punched from her chest.

“What do we do?” Michael asked, surprised by how calm her voice sounded.

“I’m keeping you under observation,” Hugh decided after a pause. “These lapses when you lose control may be violent.”

Ash’s gaze turned desperate. “Detain me,” he pleaded.

Hugh looked appalled by the idea, but Michael said, “Okay,” and met his eyes.

In that moment, she understood him better than she had ever understood anyone. Ash was gripped by the fear that at any moment, he could hurt someone he loved. Michael was not going to let that happen—not to him.

Ash was the last person who deserved that.

 

* * *

 

 

When all was said and done, Ash was comfortably detained in sickbay under a whole team’s careful observation. Michael promised to visit often and left him with a PADD loaded with incredible arrays of literature.

She collapsed when she reached her quarters, knees buckling as soon as the door closed behind her.

“I can’t do this,” she said aloud, illogically. She clawed at the constricting uniform stuck to her throat and _pulled_ , gasping for breath even though she _knew_ it couldn’t be any tighter than it normally was.

She finally got the zipper to unstick and yanked it down, leaving her jacket half-open as she tore at the collar of her undershirt.

The fabric ripped in the quiet, and Michael curled forward, breathing raggedly, thinly, for what felt like hours.

When she finally crawled into bed and managed to pass out by virtue of sheer exhaustion, it occurred to her that she was hollowly glad that Tilly hadn’t been in the room to see all that.

 

* * *

 

 

“Michael.”

Tilly’s whisper roused her from her sleep with a jolt, and Michael sat up so quickly that her forehead clacked painfully against Tilly’s shoulder.

“Sorry! I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Michael took a moment to scan her surroundings. “It is 0300 hours,” she observed blankly.

“I know,” Tilly whispered guiltily.

“Are you okay?”

Tilly sat on the edge of Michael’s bed in spite of her allergies, evidently. “I heard about Ash—I’m sorry,” she began awkwardly but sincerely.

Michael nodded sharply. Her head ached. She was so tired that she felt like disappearing into the warp core. “What else?” Her voice came out surprisingly soft, at odds with how deeply cranky she felt. Michael reflected that despite the inconveniences, she _was_ pleased to see her roommate.

Tilly bit her lip, looking nervous. They sat in silence for what could have been ten seconds but could have also been ten minutes, neither of them moving.

Finally, Tilly said, “Do you want to come to the garden with me?”

“The mushroom garden?” Michael asked, feeling inordinately confused.

“Oh—if you like. I meant the garden on Observation Deck 6, though.”

Michael blinked slowly. She didn’t know why she said, “Okay.”

She hadn’t been to the garden on Observation Deck 6, but when the doors opened, Michael’s jaw went slack in awe.

She supposed she had been peripherally aware that the _Discovery_ was first and foremost a science vessel, which probably meant a lot of interest in plant life independent from Paul’s mushrooms, but through _everything_ , she had forgotten.

The plants in this garden were all bioluminescent.

Many of them glowed in different shades, from a stereotypical greenish-blue to a deep violet-red, encompassing little daffodil-type weeds to massive vines around oddly-shaped trees, all bent to persistently, perhaps recklessly, exist in this pocket of space. The ground was packed with varying types of alien soils, but the walls and ceiling were windowpanes, and it felt like they were separate from the starship, rocketing past the stars.

“Oh,” Michael whispered hoarsely.

Tilly glanced at her with a tiny little smile. “Don’t get me wrong, I love Lieutenant Stamets’ garden, but this?”

“This is something else,” Michael finished.

They wandered around for a few moments, quietly taking in their surroundings, which were emptier than they probably were during normal circumstances. All hands were currently dedicated to the crisis, leaving them alone.

Michael felt uncharacteristically patient as Tilly clearly gathered her courage to say whatever had compelled her to wake Michael up at 0300 hours. It was the first time in a long time that the pressure on her windpipe seemed to let up a little bit.

“Captain Lorca tried to prepare me for the possibility of running into _you_ —the other you—today,” she finally said, louder than probably necessary.

Michael arched an eyebrow, falling back on her Vulcan upbringing and smoothing out her features. “Indeed?”

“If this Michael is anything like you, that’d be the end of everything,” Tilly went on, talking so quickly that the words seemed to trip over themselves in their haste to exist. “You’ve always been able to see right through me, and you know me better than—than _anybody_. If this Michael is _married_ to her Sylvia, there’s absolutely no way I’d last two minutes without me cracking or her figuring it out or both, and—”

“Breathe,” Michael murmured.

Here, Tilly sent Michael a wild, stricken look. “I can’t fuck this up for all of us.”

“You won’t,” Michael declared, feeling almost _angry_. She had no idea where this conviction came from, but Tilly failing them sounded almost as ridiculous as Sybok’s teenage attempt to adopt popular human slang.

“I don’t know why I thought this captain thing would ever be a good idea for me. I don’t know what I was thinking. God, I’m such an idiot. This is _too much_ for me. I can’t get you guys all killed just by being me—that’d be the saddest failure in the history of the galaxy.”

Michael begged to differ, but she settled for letting her eyebrows shoot up in a manner that clearly read, _Dude._ Tilly faltered at the look and scrubbed a hand over her face. Michael dully noticed that her hair was escaping from her bun in messy spirals.

“First of all, it’s unlikely that you’ll run into the other me before we get out of here,” Michael said, trying to assure both Tilly and herself that this would be a quick fix. “Second of all, you are capable of bullshitting me.”

“Bullshit.”

Michael almost smiled, lips briefly twitching. “Remember when you told me about the assigned seats?”

“You had only just met me!” Tilly exclaimed, aghast. “There’s no way I’d get away with that now.”

Michael stopped them, touching Tilly’s elbow. When Tilly started to lean into the touch, Michael shifted to grip her bicep. She paused to note that the muscle was unexpectedly defined, filing that information away for some sort of purpose that would probably be useful at some point in time.

“Sylvia,” Michael said, and that got her attention. “You can do this.”

“But—”

“But if you don’t feel like you can,” Michael cut in, keeping Tilly locked in eye contact, “I will be _right there_ , behind the scenes, at all times. You won’t have to do this alone.”

Above them, six floating lilies with a golden glow drifted in lazy arcs until one gently brushed against their only point of contact. They both glanced at Michael’s hand on Tilly’s arm, and Michael realized that she was still holding on after a surprised breath. She released her grip as casually as possible and straightened, clearing her throat.

“Thank you,” Tilly said, voice impossibly quiet in the garden’s hum. “You just keep—” she began, but shook her head, electing to leave the thought incomplete.

“Breathe,” Michael said again, feeling like a damn hypocrite.

Tilly sucked in a breath as if afraid of the consequences.

 

* * *

 

 

The transmission came when they had finally fallen into a tense rhythm of relative normalcy.

Bryce suddenly stood. Michael just so happened to be on the bridge, cautiously approaching Saru with a new request, when everything fell deathly silent.

Michael was apocalyptically aware of Tilly sitting in the captain’s chair in full Terran uniform, Lorca standing a few paces away. She counted the seconds it took for Lorca to accept the request for communication.

“Captain Tilly.”

Michael froze, blood turning to ice. She did not turn to confirm what her ears told her. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t be here. She couldn’t—

Saru caught the PADD she had let slip from her fingers before it hit the ground. He grabbed her elbow with his other hand, steadying her.

For one instant of wide-eyed, haunted eye contact, Michael entertained the idea of vanishing into nothing.

“What of it,” Tilly said flatly, but Michael could hear the edge of fear in her voice. She still couldn’t move to look.

“You forget yourself. Kneel before your Emperor.”

Michael may have made a noise at this because Saru shook his head once, frantic.

Tilly must have kneeled because she said, “My apologies, your excellency. It has been a dreadfully dull day.”

Michael finally forced herself to turn, watching numbly as Tilly slowly got to her feet again, facing a definite projection of Philippa Georgiou, cold calculation in her eyes. “Is Michael not with you?”

There was the barest pause in which that information began to sink in. Tilly blinked once before recovering admirably. “She is otherwise occupied.”

Rolling her eyes, Philippa said, “Typical. You both will beam over within the hour. We have much to discuss.”

With that, her transmission winked out, leaving the bridge in a ringing silence that melted Michael down to her bones.

Tilly slowly turned to look at her, eyes wide.

“Well,” Lorca said, clearing his throat. His face was unreadable. “Looks like Burnham’s gonna need a uniform.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Randy's character isn't exactly an OC. It's just the name I gave [this](http://www.cap-that.com/startrek/discovery/114/images/discovery1x14_0053.jpg) transporter tech.


	2. Part I: Fool's Gold

Sylvia squinted at the harsh starlight, trying to smother a scowl. “This is the last time I listen to your mother,” she muttered.

She felt Michael come to stand behind her, dropping her chin onto Sylvia’s shoulder. They both gazed out the floor-to-ceiling window that dominated the largest wall in their quarters. “And this is the last time I take vacation on _your_ ship, babe.”

Sylvia turned so that they faced each other, glaring. She jabbed Michael’s collarbone with her index finger. “If I remember correctly, last time I took vacation on _your_ ship, degenerate rebels blew up the warp core.”

Michael shrugged, sliding a hand down to Sylvia’s hip. “I thought you had fun chasing them down.”

Sylvia kept her expression stern. “Work is work.”

Michael shook her head fondly, leaning in for a brief, chaste kiss. Sylvia reflexively followed the movement when Michael pulled away. “Looks like neither of us are relaxing today.”

“Ugh,” Sylvia said with feeling, stalking over to her closet to throw on a uniform. “I don’t understand why the universe has to come and interrupt every damn time we have a moment alone.”

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

“Oh, so now _I’m_ the dramatic one?”

Michael’s only response was a lofty sniff. Sylvia turned to rifle through her shirts.

A boot hit her in the back, and Sylvia whipped around to stare at her wife in utter disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”

“It wasn’t me,” Michael said without a hint of humor. She pointed at the ceiling. “Ask the ship ghosts.”

“God, why do I even bother?”

Finally, Michael turned away to hide a grin, and Sylvia finished putting on her uniform.

“You coming to the bridge with me?”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Michael’s eyes were on the stars, stare impressively unblinking in the face of such brightness. “I want to visit those science labs you keep bragging about and see if they’re worth such praise.”

“You will find nothing lacking.”

In a slow twisting motion, Michael tore her gaze from the stars to Sylvia’s face, expression cold and steely. Sylvia suppressed a shiver. “My love,” she said, tone impersonal and dripping with ice, “pray that you are right.”

The threat was there. Sylvia could imagine what Michael would do if she found _anything_ inadequate, and a traitorous, fierce protectiveness for her crew throbbed through Sylvia’s veins. She tried to keep any hint of it off her face. “Don’t make me laugh, Captain.”

Michael smiled cruelly. “Unlikely.”

With that, Sylvia walked briskly out of her quarters, leaving Michael turning back to face the window. She was not particularly shaken by their conversation. They were not, after all, sweet or loving by nature, and it would be dishonest and ring of duplicity to pretend otherwise.

 _Like fool’s gold_ , Sylvia mused to herself.

She entered the turbolift and hit the button for the bridge, paying no mind to the low-level officers huddled away from her in an unmistakable bubble.

“Captain on the bridge!” Commander Rhys shouted the instant the turbolift doors swished open. Sylvia ignored the nervous salutes sent her way and stalked to the bridge. She wished Rhys had been slower to rise from her chair so that she could shove him to the ground, but her first officer was good at his job, already standing at an appropriately lower level with arms folded behind his back.

Sylvia folded one leg under herself as she sat down, scanning her surroundings. “I trust at least one of you has found _something_ ,” she said, keeping her tone clipped.

“We’re in another universe,” Rhys said bluntly. Sylvia liked this about him—his inability to sugar-coat things merely to gain her favor. “After we destroyed the Klingon ship,” Sylvia nodded—she did not need a reminder of the strange encounter, “we compared the rubble’s signature to our own. They do not match.”

Sylvia rolled her eyes. “Out of all the times that bastard had to be right,” she muttered. “I need to know why the _fuck_ Klingons aren’t pissing themselves to get out of our way here, and I need a strategy of how to get back to our own universe as soon as possible.”

“Stamets isn’t here,” Rhys said.

“Do I look like I care about who _isn’t_ here, Commander?”

“Captain, the spore drive is a prototype that no one knows how to work. With all due respect, without Stamets, we may be here a while.”

Sylvia inclined her head slightly. “Find out how the Klingons kept their balls here. If my crew is so incompetent, I’ll take care of the spore drive myself.”

“Captain,” Rhys said, voice blank. He saluted and strode from the bridge, leaving a terror-soaked sort of silence.

Sylvia shook her head grimly and opened up the spore drive’s schematics on a nearby console that nobody was using.

Stamets, the coward, hadn’t had the “constitution” for legitimate space travel, preferring to stay aboard the _Charon_ while everyone else risked their asses for the sake of his ridiculous invention. Sylvia frowned as she read the data. It really was an extraordinary design. Maybe, in another life, she could have even marveled at it.

As it was, she was mostly annoyed.

There was a very low likelihood of returning to their own universe without a very precise navigation mechanism. Such a mechanism had eluded Stamets’ imagination, so here they were.

For a moment, Sylvia entertained the notion of explaining the problem to Michael. Before her captaincy, Michael had been an extraordinary scientist, and Sylvia could frankly use her incredible intellect. The notion passed quickly in a haze of hollow disappointment, and Sylvia rifled through potential solutions.

Deep in her research, she did not notice when Captain Burnham stepped onto the bridge. She only became aware of her presence when she placed a delicate touch at Sylvia’s neck. No one else would dare be so bold.

“How were the labs?” she asked, turning around.

Michael looked as placid as ever. “Adequate, for now.”

Sylvia forced a cavalier grin. “I know you said you wanted to vacation on Earth, but I guess you’ll have to settle for another universe, babe.”

“How romantic of you,” Michael said dryly.

“Captain—Captains,” a yeoman interrupted. They both turned, and he paled. “Uh, you’re gonna want to see this.” He passed them a PADD.

Michael leaned over, dropping her elbow onto Sylvia’s station, so that they could read the PADD together.

“The United Federation of Planets,” Sylvia read with disdain. “Christ, what kind of hippie-ass dimension did we land in?”

Michael scrolled through the page on-screen. “Oh, it’s based on equality.” Her lips turned up in a mocking curl. “How quaint.”

“That would explain the Klingon thing.”

“Captain, we’re getting an emergency communication from a Starfleet vessel.”

Sylvia stood, shoving the PADD into the yeoman’s chest. “On-screen.”

A woman materialized on the bridge, face lined and weary. Her uniform was off-puttingly dull and uninspired, Sylvia thought, and she arched an eyebrow in amusement.

“Cadet Tilly?” the woman said in surprise. “What the hell are you wearing?”

“’Cadet?’ That’s cute. That’s adorable,” Sylvia mused. She cocked her head slightly, intrigued despite herself. “And who are you?”

The woman seemed to really take in Sylvia’s appearance, and she frowned, noting that something was off. “Admiral Cornwell. Listen, I need you to—”

“We don’t take orders from you. God, that’s so presumptuous.”

Cornwell blinked in shock. “Excuse me?”

Sylvia frowned theatrically, glancing around the bridge as if taking in this new universe. “This is Captain Sylvia Tilly of the Terran Empire, and it honestly looks like y’all are _begging_ to be conquered. We’ll be seeing each other, Admiral.” Sylvia finished with a contemptuous sneer and nodded at her communications officer, who cut off the transmission. “What a bunch of _pussies_.”

“You want to conquer them, Sylvia?” Michael asked, stepping up beside her.

Sylvia continued facing forward, looking at Michael out of the corner of her eye. “Darling, it’s our responsibility. Did you _see_ her? Pathetic.”

Michael smiled a very faint smile. “ _Taluhk nash-veh k’dular_.”

Sylvia went very still. “Was that Vulcan?”

“Was what Vulcan?” Michael said, sounding genuinely confused. Sylvia tucked her chin down to her chest to hide her expression, but Michael wasn’t looking at her.

“Never mind, I guess.” She smoothed out her frown, unsettled. But there were more important things at stake here. “I take it you’re on board?”

“You know me so well.”

Sylvia didn’t bother smothering her grin, feeling like maybe this didn’t have to be such a horrible thing after all. “Time to fuck shit up.”

 

* * *

 

 

Sylvia could not focus.

There was so much to do, but her mind stretched out in terrible directions, thoughts tumbling over themselves like words never were allowed to do. She wandered around her ship’s halls, stride designed to look purposeful, but she had left the conn in the hands of her gamma crew and dismissed the alpha crew to more essential tasks.

Sylvia remembered her first day aboard this ship and could not find it in her to feel nostalgic about it. She remembered crawling up into a Jefferies tube to fix a shot wire, and she sat in the humming darkness for what was probably only five minutes but felt like a lifetime after the wire had been fixed. She had felt like such a part of something.

When she was crawling out of the tube, she’d noticed a circuital irregularity and paused to quickly fix that, too. She had never told anyone about this, and no one had ever mentioned it.

Now, Sylvia paused outside of the engineering sector. She couldn’t even remember which Jefferies tube she’d fixed on that first day. She took a moment to watch two ensigns bicker over a line of code and bit down on the workings of a sad smile. She pretended that she did not know both of their names and qualifications.

Sylvia did not consciously decide to slip inside and hide between the big machines that made up the ghost town of the warp core processors, but she found herself ghosting fingertips over the whirring machines. She did not wish for the past. She merely wished that things were different.

She stopped in her tracks when she heard voices.

“…that you can’t keep doing this.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I’ve been _trying_ , but—”

“You’re not trying hard enough. I’m not saying this because I want you to be scared. I’m saying this because I don’t think you deserve to be punished for it.”

Sylvia’s limbs tingled in sudden numbness. This was undoubtedly Commander Rhys. She had never even seen him _visit_ engineering.

“I know. I’ll make changes.”

“Ask someone for help. It’s not the end of the goddamn world.”

Sylvia finally placed the other voice as a newer crewmember named Bianca Genaro, a young ensign who hadn’t really made waves in any sort of way. Of course, _Sylvia_ had covertly ensured that she’d adjusted to the ship enough to feel a part of it, but why the hell would Rhys care about her?

“Commander, I just—”

“You’re a good engineer, kid. You just need some guidance. The _Discovery_ isn’t like other ships. We don’t ostracize crewmembers for being imperfect, alright? We care about each other. We help each other.”

Sylvia leaned heavily against the nearest processor, trying to keep her breathing even. Everyone on the goddamn ship knew _that_ , but Rhys just couldn’t go around saying it. It was the unspoken rule of the _Discovery_ , and it had to fucking stay unspoken.

“I don’t know if I can believe that.”

“You’ll adjust,” Rhys said, voice becoming more assured and commanding. “Just don’t go talking about it, and you’ll be fine.”

Sylvia pinched her nose, trying to resist the newfound urge to fucking _murder_ her first officer. She wondered if he’d been so goddamn careless about this for the past couple of years. She wondered what she was going to do to make him stop.

Ensign Genaro left soon after, and Sylvia only had to wait a moment before Rhys stepped into the shadowed alley where she still hid, looking wary. “Hi, Captain,” he said.

“I cannot _fucking_ believe you,” Sylvia said, sounding much more exhausted than angry.

“I won’t apologize. You know it’s true. We’re not the same as other ships in the fleet, and you know it.”

Sylvia closed her eyes briefly. “Is it me? Am I a weak captain?” The question was out before Sylvia even knew she was thinking it, and she cursed herself.

“You are the best captain I have ever met,” Rhys said lowly. “Do you even remember what it was like before you took over?”

Sylvia shivered, recalling the days leading up to the mutiny. “Yes.”

“You _saved all of us_. You have the most loyal crew in the entire empire, and you have to know it.”

“Why?” Sylvia snapped cruelly, squaring her shoulders. “Because I killed a nasty guy and took his place?”

“Because you care about your crew.”

“Don’t say that.” Sylvia’s heart hammered in her throat, and she struggled to keep a handle on her composure. “ _Michael fucking Burnham_ is on this ship.”

Rhys went still, slowly absorbing the significance of her words. “Oh,” he said.

“Yeah, _oh_ ,” Sylvia echoed mockingly. “I know that the crew needs us more than ever. I _know_. But I’d rather they be scared than—than—”

“You don’t have to say it.”

They both knew what the consequences would be if Michael found out just how weak their crew was. They’d be dishonorably discharged at best, imprisoned and executed at worst.

Sylvia inhaled as evenly as she could, watching as Rhys rubbed his head, grimacing.

“Look, Commander. This is going to end as soon as possible. I’m trying my goddamn best to get us back to our own universe so that we can get everything under control and back to normal, but I need your help.”

Rhys stared at her for one blank moment. “What about all that crap about conquest?”

Sylvia shrugged. “It’s a worst-case scenario. I know what the Emperor wants, but we’ve gotta be able to get home if we even think about proceeding with her plans.”

Rhys nodded. “Okay, Captain. I trust you.”

“Thank you.”

“What can I do to help?”

Sagging heavily against the processor, Sylvia said, “Protect the crew.”

 

* * *

 

 

“I hate it here,” Michael sighed as she threw herself under the covers. “I miss my ship.”

“It’s a temporary gig,” Sylvia said distractedly, trying to find her toothbrush. “I just need to find a navigator for the spore drive.”

The admission was unintentional, and Sylvia paused when she realized she’d said it, but Michael didn’t seem bothered. She just threw an elbow over her eyes and said, “Fucking _Stamets_.”

“Coward,” Sylvia agreed, internally deflating in relief.

“Is the navigator a feat of engineering or is it some sort of organism?”

Sylvia frowned, throwing a look at Michael through the mirror. “Why the hell would it be an organism?”

“I don’t know. It was just the way you said it.”

Sylvia seethed for a moment, brushing her teeth much more violently than necessary. When she crawled onto the empty side of the bed, Michael sat up straight and opened a projection of an astrographic map of their current location.

“I’ve been here before,” she declared, narrowing her eyes and pinching her fingers to zoom in on a particular system. “Vicus VII.” She tapped the seventh planet from the star of interest in triumph.

“Okay,” Sylvia said, irritated. “What does this have to do with—”

“The species on this planet exists in infinite dimensions. They may be able to help us.”

Sylvia stared at Michael blankly. “Darling, did you hit your head when I blew up those Klingons?”

Michael shot her a glare before maximizing the image of Vicus VII, a red-and-blue planet not much larger than the Earth’s moon. “It would be fucking stupid of us to dismiss them because of our morals. We are desperate, Sylvia.”

They really did not have the luxury for principles, Sylvia conceded, rubbing her eyes tiredly. “How far away is it?”

Michael did some snap calculations. “Ten hours at warp six.”

Sylvia sighed and set an alarm for nine hours before paging the bridge to inform them of their change in plans. “You better be right about this.”

Michael smiled. “When have I ever been wrong?”

Sylvia did not grace her with a response.

 

* * *

 

 

“You cannot go alone,” Rhys said plainly, keeping pace with them easily as Michael and Sylvia walked to the shuttle bay. “Do you even know how to fly?”

“I do,” Sylvia said. “And, sweetie, I hate to break it to you, but this mission’s security clearance is too steep for anyone else.”

Rhys scowled. “Because security is the priority right now,” he said, voice thick with sarcasm. “Captain, I cannot condone this.”

“Good thing you don’t have to, then.”

Sylvia and Rhys stopped in the doorway to the bay, watching in silence while Michael continued to their smallest shuttle, the _Harpoon_. Michael effortlessly took over the preparation, issuing orders with a quiet gravitas that made Sylvia rock back onto her heels in contentment. Truly, despite the circumstances, she was happy to have Michael leading by her side. Maybe someday, it would even feel _right_.

“I love her, but I don’t trust her,” Sylvia whispered to Rhys. He carefully did not show any signs of acknowledgement. “While we’re on-planet, I need you here with the crew.”

“Captain?” Rhys did not look at her. He kept his eyes on the _Harpoon_ , and Sylvia felt a dull throb of fondness for her first officer—out of place, incredibly dangerous, damning enough to signify weakness.

“You will make a fine captain one day,” Sylvia said, clapping him on the shoulder without looking at him.

Rhys gave her a calculating look. “Your death would be the only way that I could become captain. Sir, I don’t think—”

“There are many ways to become captain,” Sylvia interrupted in a low voice. She took a step towards the shuttle. “Keep the crew safe, Commander.”

Rhys saluted.

“Everything ready?”

Michael glanced at her and back at the _Harpoon_. “Yes.”

Sylvia looked back at where Rhys stood, staring at them with an unreadable expression. He would take care of the crew while they were gone. Sylvia and Michael were really the only ones in legitimate danger here.

“Let’s go, then.”

 

* * *

 

 

The flight down to Vicus VII was much more turbulent than Sylvia would have liked. Michael lounged in the co-pilot’s seat, seemingly unbothered.

“I don’t care for your first officer,” Michael said, examining her phaser.

“I don’t like him either, but he does the job well.”

She hummed.

“Look, we have to be prepared for the outcome where we don’t find this navigator with these things,” Sylvia said tactlessly after a moment, uncomfortable with the way that Michael kept flicking her phaser to _kill_ absently.

Michael shrugged. “Then we’ll just make this place our new home. We’re adaptable like that.”

“I don’t like it.”

“It’s not my favorite either, but we’ll make do.” She leaned forward in her chair to catch her gaze. “We always do, babe.”

Sylvia swallowed around a lump in her throat. “Yeah.”

They were ripped out of the moment by a particularly brutal jerk of turbulence. “ _Bath’pa_ ,” Michael hissed.

“I really need you to look into that,” Sylvia shouted over the whine of the engine, wrestling with the controls as the shaking grew worse.

Michael’s hands flew over her console, checking read-outs and some other science bullshit. “Ion storm,” she said grimly after a too-long moment.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

The ship lurched, and Sylvia barely clung to the controls, gritting her teeth as visibility became almost non-existent. There was a horrible, screeching scream of metal tearing as they descended into the atmosphere, and then the whine of wind hit them. Sylvia’s ears popped and went numb and hot-sticky-wet with blood.

Michael grabbed her wrist. For a wild moment, Sylvia thought that she was trying to tell her to get her hands off the controls, but then their eyes locked, and Sylvia knew what they were both thinking.

_May as well hold hands if we’re going to fucking die in some lame ion storm._

It wasn’t as grand as Sylvia had predicted. In her dreams, she assumed she would die heroically saving the _Discovery_ in a blaze of righteous self-sacrifice, probably during some crusading war that she didn’t really care about. She had dreamed up many other possibilities, though: death by firing squad, being slaughtered by angry alien prisoners, maybe even a freak accident on a starbase.

But in none of her scenarios was Michael ever by her side.

Even though in a few, she was behind the trigger.

Sylvia took one hand off of the controls to grip Michael’s in a fierce squeeze, half-heartedly attempting to wrestle the _Harpoon_ under control.

Then, something big and dark and terrible came out of nowhere, and Sylvia knew nothing but oblivion.

 

* * *

 

 

Sylvia woke up feeling like her brain was going to melt out of her ears.

It was worse than any hangover she had ever experienced, her head pounding with the force of a massive clocktower, her stomach roiling like the electric seas of Io, her throat thick and dry and gross like a rodent had curled up and died in there.

She cracked an eye open and felt blinded by the muted lighting, squeezing it back shut. She attempted to say, “Holy fucking ass-nuts,” but all that came out was a garbled, “Hmmmfffutss.”

“Oh, dear,” said a strangely airy, tinkly voice. “Are you alright?”

Sylvia managed to peel her eyes open again and blinked numbly at the sight before her.

The owner of the voice was definitely humanoid, but its skin issued a soft lavender blue glow. It was bald, its eyes bug-like yet golden, its nose wide and flat, its lips missing, its ears tall and rather horn-like.

“God,” Sylvia croaked, then curled over to dry-heave.

“You have sustained significant injuries,” the thing said, unbothered by the fact that it did not have a mouth or that Sylvia had tried to vomit on its dainty feet. “Fortunately, my people were able to heal you. We found you very quickly.”

“But…”

“We utilize natural methods. Your recovery will take longer than you are typically accustomed.”

“There was another human with me. Did—did you—”

The thing blinked once. Its eyelids moved from either side instead of from bottom-to-top. “We saw no other human.”

“You must have,” Sylvia protested, feeling very faint. “We were holding hands.”

“I am so sorry. We found no one else.”

Sylvia gaped at the thing in muted shock. “Well, that can’t be right.” Plane crashes were nothing to Michael. She could brush those off like goddamn paper cuts. If she hadn’t survived this, Sylvia would marry _a fucking Klingon_ next.

The thing sort of… fluttered its limbs. “I will return,” it squeaked, but Sylvia paid it no mind, struggling to get to her feet.

They had dressed her in some sort of pale yellow, long, flowy garment that didn’t show off her curves at all. Michael would hate it. It made her feel like a goddamn child wearing a nightgown. All she needed was a fucking teddy bear.

And—this was _great_ —no shoes.

“I have sensitive feet,” Sylvia grumbled. “Goddamn universe.”

Five glowing purple things glided into the tent-ish thing that Sylvia was only just registering as he surroundings. Sylvia noted that her hair had reverted into a gross mess of curls and threw it over her shoulders in disgust. She moved to exit the tent, but the things did not move out of her way.

“Oh my god, am I going to have to kill you? I really don’t have a lot of time.”

“Miss Tilly—”

“ _Captain_ Tilly.”

“Ah, my mistake,” one of the things said, exchanging a look with its companions. “Lon informed me that you crashed with another human.”

Sylvia stared at them, wary. “My wife,” she finally said.

“Yes. And we agree that we should have at least found a body.”

Sylvia’s throat went tight, and her fingers clenched in a spasming grip.

“You are bound to such corporeal forms, I believe.”

“You’re a condescending bitch.”

“And you are a genocidal psychopath,” it responded primly. “So, I suppose we can move forward now that we know one another’s faults.”

Sylvia narrowed her eyes. “Alright, E.T. Let’s get on with it.”

“You may call me Oth. And we think we know what happened to your wife.”

Sylvia tried not to react, but she did not look away form Oth’s unchanging expression. “And?”

Oth twitched slightly before saying, “Many, many years ago, our people diverged into two sects. It does not matter _why_ this happened, but the two sides have raged a silent, secret war on one another ever since. We, the Sronks, have lived atop the world for centuries, while our enemies, the Tholo, live beneath the world.”

“Like, underground,” Sylvia deadpanned, restlessly trying not to _kill something_ while Oth droned on and on.

“I suppose, yes.”

“So, Michael’s underground.”

“Maybe,” Oth agreed. “However, it is worthy to consider that her body merely does not want to be found.”

“Okay, what is _that_ supposed to mean?”

Sylvia wasn’t all that amazing at reading their expressions, but she could have sworn that the group of Sronks exchanged what looked like pitying glances. “Oh, my dear.”

“Don’t you ‘ _dear’_ me.”

Oth skimmed soft fingertips across the front of Sylvia’s lame dress. “Your soul is out of sync with your body.”

Sylvia stared. “Okay.”

“You need all the help you can get.”

Sylvia wanted to reflexively revolt against the notion, but she recalled Michael’s words—they were desperate. They _needed_ help.

Really, _Sylvia_ needed help.

She squared her shoulders and tried to muster up as much of a captainly demeanor as she could in this outfit. “Thank you. I really need to—”

“You agree to accept our help?” Oth interrupted.

Sylvia scowled. “Uh, yeah? I thought I just said—”

All five Sronks fluttered happily and then bizarrely exploded into lavender blue sparkles. Sylvia gaped at the spots where they’d been standing. The sparkles floated there passively for an instant, and Sylvia thought, _What the fuck_ , very numbly before they picked up speed in their gentle elliptical floating paths, starting to shoot towards her face.

“Mother _fucker_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vulcan translations:  
> Taluhk nash-veh k’dular. --> I cherish thee.  
> Bath’pa. --> Damn.


	3. Part 2.0: Ghosts

Saru burst into the Captain’s ready room only to find Lorca, Hugh, and Ash already huddled around Michael. Michael locked eyes with him over their general nervous fluttering, and a tangible wave of grief passed between them before Saru looked away.

Ash fiddled with a clasp at the back of Michael’s uniform. “Does it fit okay?” he asked hoarsely.

Michael nodded.

“I’m sending you with a kit of hypos,” Hugh said, passing a neat disk about the size of Michael’s palm to Ash, who tucked it into some sort of pocket on the side of her left thigh. “They’re all labelled with names and purpose.”

“Thank you.”

“This is a transponder,” Lorca said. He grabbed Michael’s hand when she didn’t move and pressed it into her palm, tucking her fingers around it. “Just press the button when you want us to beam you back. I gave Tilly the same one in case you’re separated.”

Michael’s limbs went ice cold at the notion, and she shuddered. Lorca stared at her, jaw slightly slack.

An awkward pause later, Saru stepped forward. “We have not yet found a secure way to communicate with you, but it should not look suspicious to communicate with the _Discovery_ , and our old code should suffice if we find no other options before your departure in—” Saru glanced at the time “—thirteen minutes.”

Seemingly all at once, everyone else noticed the tension that crackled like fracturing rocks during an earthquake that flowed between Michael and Saru. Ash straightened and stepped away from her, and Hugh grabbed his elbow to drag him from the room, muttering something about meeting them in the transporter room. Lorca hesitated a moment longer, eyes flicking between them, before patting Michael on the shoulder and exiting without a word.

Saru cleared his throat, dropping his gaze to adjust the Terran Starfleet badge, tilting it insignificantly. “She is not her,” he finally said.

“I know that.”

“Well, of course you do. You are, in fact, the smartest person I know,” Saru grumbled, sounding flustered. He brushed some imaginary dust from her shoulders. “Your reason tends to collapse when it comes to her, though.”

Michael tried not to wince. “Be honest,” she whispered, words barely there, “my reasoning capabilities have been nonexistent ever since the Battle of the Binary Stars—maybe longer.”

“Michael,” Saru began, tone gentle. He stopped, breathing deeply, forcing himself to make eye contact. “Your logic has always been so strong because it is _shaped_ by your emotions—by the emotions of those around you. Your capacity for compassion is part of what has kept us alive for this long. Do not doubt yourself so much.”

“But—”

“I am not suggesting you cease being self-critical, nor am I suggesting you succumb to your more _impulsive_ instincts.” Here, he gripped her shoulder for a moment, and it was somehow much more comforting than Lorca’s touch had been moments ago. “Merely listen to yourself.”

Michael struggled against the tightness in her throat to croak out, “Saru, I…” and found she had no way of verbalizing her thoughts.

“Stay safe, Michael. Let me walk you to the transporter room.”

“Okay.”

Michael felt blank. She did not remember the walk to the transporter room at all, but she remembered the wide-eyed expression on Tilly’s face as she stood alone on the transporter pad, shoulders hunched into herself with fear before she saw Michael and straightened her spine, smoothing her expression as much as she could.

Michael stepped up next to her.

She did not look at her.

“Are you…” Tilly began, but Michael’s lack of response made the words die on her tongue.

“Are you ladies ready?” Lorca asked, voice more gruff than usual.

“Yes,” Michael said with an eerie calm that had permeated her core. Nothing could make this worse. She had already hit rock bottom a thousand times over, and the only way out was up.

“Um,” Tilly said. “Yeah.”

Michael wanted to tell her not to be nervous, but she seemed to be able to do nothing besides the bare essentials, standing still and breathing and blinking with a beating heart like just _existing_ was a choice.

“Now, remember. Terrans aren’t notoriously touchy in front of other people,” Lorca said. “You’re married, but you’re not _Orion_.”

Michael frowned at that. “Captain, I don’t think—”

“Of course,” Tilly interrupted. “We’re not gonna let you down, sir.”

Lorca narrowed his eyes and examined them for a moment before finally nodding. “Alright. If everything’s okay, you may energize, Lieutenant.”

Michael dully recognized Randy at the transporter controls, and he nodded at her gravely before sliding up the mechanism. Michael felt the tell-tale unhappy tingle of the beam before she became nothing for one glorious, empty instant.

Then, she was on the Emperor’s ship, and existence came crashing back to her.

Georgiou stood before them, a squad of guards spread in a neat arc behind her, but she paid them no mind, smiling pleasantly at her guests. “My daughter,” she said to Michael, voice soft. Michael’s throat was a finger trap, pulling endlessly tighter. Georgiou turned to Tilly. “My daughter by law. I am gratified to see your safe return.”

“As are we, mother,” Michael said dryly, trying to adopt the expression of aloof boredom that she had seen in all of her counterpart’s photographs. She felt like she was splitting apart at the molecules. She felt like taking herself off autopilot would destroy her.

“I could have lived without your senseless wandering through the galaxy,” Georgiou went on, seemingly unbothered. “Were you disoriented upon your return?”

Michael was dimly surprised when Tilly answered. “We had business,” she said. Her tone straddled a careful line between dismissive and sharp, but Georgiou did not seem to think it was out of the ordinary. Tilly flicked her eyes meaningfully towards the bodyguards, and Georgiou’s smile became cruel.

“Ah,” she said. “Join me for dinner.”

Michael and Tilly exchanged a glance before stepping down from the transporter pad. Georgiou turned on her heel, and a golden cape whipped out in a dazzling fan in her wake. They waited until there were several paces between them and the guards before following after her.

“There will be a more _publicized_ dinner tomorrow,” Georgiou threw casually over her shoulder. “Tonight is for family.”

The halls of the _Charon_ were much more spacious than any starship Michael had ever been on, which included the Klingon behemoth where her Philippa had died. Perhaps not so shockingly, they were also desolate. They did not encounter a single person on the way to what Michael presumed was the Emperor’s personal dining room.

The room was dark, and Michael and Tilly stayed a safe distance away as Georgiou stalked towards a wide window, gazing out at the dim light of the stars beyond. “Dismissed,” she said, and the security guards saluted before silently exiting the room.

Everything stayed very quiet for a long time.

“When you become Emperor, Michael, your subjects will ask you about this day,” Georgiou finally said. “They will demand to be blessed by this moment of glory with the knowledge of what it will give the empire.”

She finally turned around, facing them but keeping her eyes on Michael. Michael slowly cocked her head to the side, trying to convey arrogance.

Georgiou smiled. “How does it feel to have so much at your fingertips?”

Michael panicked for a split second before forcing a smirk. “It is my due.”

“You have worked hard for this, my daughter. I am proud of you.”

Michael resisted the profound urge to bow over in pain, instilling every bit of her Vulcan upbringing to keep herself still. “Thank you, mother.”

Georgiou shifted her attention to Tilly. “Now, I _know_ you will have a comprehensive list of complaints to throw at Mister Stamets, but I do not care for the details. On a holistic level, how did the spore drive function? Were there any complications?”

It took a moment for the implications to sink in, and Michael felt her lips part with the shock of it. Thankfully, Tilly was able to get over herself more quickly than Michael, and she rolled her eyes theatrically before saying, “I mean, it got us here, didn’t it?”

Georgiou’s eyes were alight with humor. “I will ensure to provide Stamets with a security detail before you debrief with him. As much as I hate the man, he is rather indispensable.”

“Not if I get familiar enough with the spore drive,” Tilly muttered loudly enough for them all to hear clearly. Georgiou shook her head fondly.

“What was the other universe like?”

“Terrible,” Michael whispered before thinking. She swiftly added, “The humans there were so pathetic, allying themselves so closely with Vulcan, demonstrating sufficient weakness to invite war with the _Klingons_.”

“How repulsive,” Georgiou said, clearly fascinated. “I never thought the Klingons had the balls for resistance.”

Tilly snorted at that, clearly a nervous response that she tried to pass off as mirth. Michael shifted her weight, feeling like she was going to buzz out of her skin. Georgiou didn’t seem concerned by the lapse in conversation, sitting down at the table and gesturing for them to follow.

“Relax,” she said as they settled down. “I meant it when I said that tonight is for family. No more work discussion for the evening. We have all the time in the world.”

Michael and Tilly exchanged glances with the sinking knowledge of just how _wrong_ the Emperor was.

 

* * *

 

 

One of Georgiou’s personal guards led them down several wide, empty hallways to an opulent doorway. He gestured at the handles. “You will be staying here for the duration of your visit.”

“Dismissed,” Michael said coolly, trying not to glance at him as she flung open the doors. She saw the guard salute in her peripheral vision before she turned and slammed the doors shut in his face.

The silence that echoed about in the chamber was chilling enough that Michael let out a loud breath just to hear it. Tilly stood a few paces away. The only thing Michael could see in the gloom of the enormous room was the golden glint of Tilly’s uniform against the quiet light of the stars. Tilly made no noise. Michael had to remind herself that she was not contending with a ghost—she was alive, and so was Tilly.

“Are you okay?” Michael whispered, voice choked and thin, and she considered that maybe _she_ was in fact the only one who felt like a ghost in the room.

Tilly inhaled sharply, and it was like a trigger went off. “That was the scariest dinner I have ever had in my life, oh my god, I can’t believe I didn’t get us killed—how are we still alive—Michael, I swear I am so out of my depth right now, and I just want this all to be over, I’m—”

Michael jerked forward to clap a hand over Tilly’s mouth, and she saw the whites of her eyes in the dark, stark against the shadows on her skin. This close, Michael could make out the slight frizzing in her hair, and she could feel the unsteady rise and fall of her chest as Tilly breathed unevenly against Michael’s palm.

Michael put a fingertip to her lips, and Tilly nodded slowly. Releasing her, Michael stepped away to locate a PADD, quickly installing an old program used to identify any bugs in a certain radius. Tilly stood very still as Michael combed their quarters for any signs of tampering. She found three bugs, all differently designed, all hidden very cleverly, and killed them by crushing them under her boot.

It was still dark.

“I’m sorry,” Tilly whispered.

Michael considered bridging the distance between them, pressing her lips together as she watched Tilly shrink in on herself. “I like that you’re not paranoid. You shouldn’t be.”

Tilly rubbed the back of her neck. “Well, then I’m sorry that you have to be.”

Michael took a deep, steadying breath and slowly approached Tilly, hesitating before loosely grabbing her wrist. “I am the way that I am,” she murmured. “It is illogical to regret this.”

Tilly twisted her wrist so that their hands were clasped, and Michael shivered involuntarily, even though they were both wearing gloves. “I like the way that you are. I like who you’ve become. I don’t think we would have been friends, before.”

Before Michael lost her rank and lost her captain and lost her lungs.

“Maybe,” she allowed. “I didn’t have any friends, back then.”

“Oh.”

“I’m glad we are. Friends, that is.”

Tilly smiled, a naked, genuine thing that lit up the room despite its darkness. “Me too.”

“What are we going to do?” Michael thought out loud after a quiet moment. “We need a game plan. We need to find a way out of here.”

“We should also find out what the hell this universe wants with ours.”

“Nothing good.”

“No.”

Michael ran her free hand through her hair. “I’m going to go find this universe’s Stamets tomorrow morning and figure out what’s going on before you have to debrief him. Can you try and find out more from the people on this ship?”

“Okay. Yeah, I can do that. God, being a spy is so stressful.”

Michael smiled. “I decidedly prefer exploration.”

“ _Duh_ ,” Tilly said emphatically.

“We should rest.”

“Oh. Right.”

They didn’t move right away. Michael took a moment to let her eyes drift over Tilly’s uniform. It suited her, she thought. With a chill, Michael reflected that perhaps Tilly was just as likely to become her counterpart as Michael was to become her own counterpart.

It was an unpleasant notion.

They released each other and ended up standing frozen at the end of the massive bed that dominated half the room, not looking at each other.

“I’ll sleep on the sofa—”

“How dare you,” Tilly interrupted tonelessly. “Nope. This bed is big enough that things won’t get awkward. It’ll be like a sleepover.”

“Okay,” Michael said, numb.

When all was said and done and they were both lying flat on their backs with a full meter of space between them, Michael felt absolutely _inordinately_ foolish. They slept in the same room every night. There was no reason for this to be uncomfortable.

“Tell me a story,” Michael whispered to the ceiling, feeling young and vulnerable and _aching hurting decaying_.

“What kind of story?”

“Any.”

There was a long pause in which Michael thought Tilly had dismissed her request as rhetorical, but then Tilly started speaking in that soft, secret voice that Michael only ever heard when they were alone, painting a picture of an old world with new creatures, coaxing Michael’s limbs to relax to a rhythm of words. She fell asleep before finding out if the young creature ever saved herself from the great decaying villain.

 

* * *

 

 

Michael briefly woke up with red hair in her mouth and an arm thrown across her stomach, and it was okay.

There was ice in her fingers and fire burning up her lungs and a vice around her throat, but Tilly was there, too.

 

* * *

 

 

It took ages to find Stamets.

Thankfully, her counterpart seemed to be intimidating enough that no one approached her as she wandered around the ship, essentially everyone keeping their heads down after a quick respectful salute when she stalked past. This had the bonus effect of no one questioning her about what the hell she was doing as she peaked into rooms whose functions her counterpart likely would have known.

Michael was beginning to lose steam when she found a familiar garden.

She let out a soft breath of relief and slipped inside, frowning when she noticed that some of the mushrooms were _dying_. It was just different enough from Paul’s garden that it sent a strange little shudder down her spine.

She wandered through the garden for a minute before finding a sealed door that presumably led to this Stamets’ laboratory. Michael had come prepared for this, and she set up the communicator Tilly had rigged for her this morning to eavesdrop through the door.

It took a moment for it to catch any conversation.

“…insufferable about this. God, I seriously hate that woman.”

“I know, sir.”

“If she calls me a coward, do I have permission to request I _never work with her again_?”

“No.”

Stamets groaned melodramatically. “When should I expect her?”

“I do not presume to know the intricacies of Captain Tilly’s schedule.”

“The bitch could at least give me some warning.”

Michael tensed at this, jaw tight against Stamets’ hateful words. When they had first met, Michael had of course thought Paul overly rude and perhaps even moderately disrespectful, but the vehemence of this Stamets made his first impression seem cordial.

“Wait, hang on a sec, Marlena.”

The other room descended into silence, and a creeping paranoia made Michael put her communicator away and turn around, trying to appear busy. She managed to only glance dismissively in Stamets’ direction when the sealed door opened with a hiss.

“Burnham,” he said in surprise.

“Your garden is dying,” Michael said, trying to sound bored.

“It is not _dying_.” He looked aghast. “What the fuck are you even doing here?”

Michael plucked a mushroom from a nearby pot, ignoring Stamets’ unsubtle hiss of displeasure as she twirled the stem between her gloved fingers, watching the skin peel and crumble beneath her touch. “I am scouting you out,” she said honestly after a suitably infuriating pause.

“Captain, I have no issue with you—only your _wife_.” The venom behind this made Michael clench her jaw. “In fact, I’ve always found you perfectly reasonable. I’m sure we can find a mutually beneficial compromise.”

“Oh?”

Stamets fidgeted, clearly agitated by Michael’s lack of attention. “I don’t want her to hurt me just as much as you don’t want her to know your little _secret_.”

Michael glanced at Stamets’ assistant for the first time. She’d melted into the background, studiously trying to pretend that she wasn’t listening as she tapped busily at her PADD. Michael arched an eyebrow at Stamets in judgement.

“Marlena, go find something useful to do.”

“Sir.”

After she had left, Michael rolled her neck and dropped the mushroom carelessly, taking a few steps forward. “You have no manners, Paul. Are you not gratified that your invention worked enough to return us alive?”

Stamets scoffed. “I always knew it was going to work. I’ll gloat later.”

“Arrogant as ever.”

He glared. “What do you _really_ want?”

What Michael really wanted was information, but it seemed that Stamets and Michael in this universe knew each other well enough to speak in vague circles with sufficient understanding. When Michael had joined Starfleet so many years ago, she had never expected to need such nuanced social skills to navigate this type of conversation. To buy herself some time to think, she levelled Stamets with a dismissive look in the hopes that it would piss him off.

It did.

“ _God_ , you’re such a fucking spoiled brat. You sure do like to wear the shoes of the Emperor’s daughter for someone of your background.”

“Enough,” Michael said, sharp. “You forget yourself.”

“Someone’s bitchy today. _Fine_. I think I know what you’re here for. Follow me.”

Michael let herself exhale, following Stamets at a slightly slower pace through his maze of a laboratory. It reminded her of Earth’s post-apocalyptic art movement. Fungal growth overtook technology all across the room in improbable ways, making the whole space feel abandoned. Michael stared at a lopsided _wrong_ -looking mushroom attempting to grow through a shattered computer screen and flexed her fingers.

“Here,” Stamets said, throwing something at her that Michael caught with a jerk of limbs. He did not look at her as he continued rummaging through what appeared to be a desk drawer. Michael examined the object in her hand, shocked to see a paper notepad. “I think everything will be different today, so you’ll have to wait at least until tomorrow, though I would prefer three weeks ‘cause I’m not allowed to leave this ship for another twenty-two days.”

“My plans are none of your concern,” Michael said slowly, inordinately confused as she flicked open a random page to see a highly detailed schedule.

“Sure.” He slammed the drawer shut and passed Michael a weird-looking pen. “Now, will you _please_ make sure your wife doesn’t tear me to shreds? I’d suggest a mild sedative, but I’m on an enforced leave from recreational drug use.”

“If your data proves to be _useful_ , I will see what I can do.”

“Thank _fuck_. With all due respect, _what a bitch_.”

Michael scowled. “I am feeling considerably less grateful now.”

Waving a dismissive hand, Stamets said, “Whatever. You’ll forget about all that as soon as you read those notes.”

“Get back to work.”

“Ma’am,” Stamets said mockingly, throwing in a sloppy salute before turning back to his work. Michael shook her head in disgust and strode from the laboratory.

She ducked into a supply closet she had found on the third deck an hour ago to read the notebook. Scanning the first few pages, her jaw went slack and her fingers went numb as if from lack of oxygen.

“Oh, god,” she whispered.

 

* * *

 

 

Tilly wasn’t in their room.

Michael was gripped by a distant but incredibly fervent urgency as she dialed Tilly’s comm frequency for the eighth time with no answer.

She must have looked especially murderous when she stormed out of their room because three security officers immediately approached her and asked if there was anything she needed.

“Have any of you seen Captain Tilly?”

They exchanged troubled glances. “Uh—”

“Oh, Captain Tilly is talking to some cadets on Deck 9,” a passing officer said, and Michael’s heart thudded in her chest. “I was there for a few minutes. She’s a remarkable woman.”

“Out of my way,” Michael muttered, shoving her way through the throng of people to get to the elevators.

People actually physically jumped out of her path when they spotted her coming, terror in their eyes until she stalked past. Michael heard more exhales of relief within a span of ten minutes than she had heard cumulatively in the past ten years.

When she finally found Tilly, she was surrounded by a group of wide-eyed cadets, looking imperious and intimidating like she was the focus of a Renaissance painting. The students formed a natural halo around her, leaving just enough obvious distance to signify her near-divine importance.

Michael came to an abrupt stop, boots clacking on the hard floor, and Tilly looked in her direction. When their gazes locked, Michael froze at the flash of panic she saw. The moment stretched on longer than it should have, the meters between them gaping like open wounds.

The cadets filling the space separating them turned to see what had captured Tilly’s attention and found Michael. Their reactions wobbled between a curiously obvious line of fear and awe, and everything went breathtakingly silent.

“Captain Burnham,” Tilly said. “’Sup?”

Michael raised an eyebrow. “I can see you’re busy,” she said in a tone that clearly conveyed her disapproval.

Tilly smirked. “Aw, did you miss me? I was barely gone two hours.”

Face uncomfortably hot, Michael lifted her chin in cool contempt and tried for her best stern glare. “I will be in our quarters when you’re done _babysitting_.”

“Don’t be like that, babe,” Tilly called after her as she moved to exit the room. Michael studiously ignored her. Before the doors sealed behind her, she heard a cadet mutter, “Holy fuck, she is so much scarier than I thought was possible. I don’t know how Captain Tilly _lives_ with her, much less—”

Michael fought valiantly against the urge to sag into the closed door and only failed a little bit when she paused to lean against a column, closing her eyes and massaging her temples to stave off the headache.

“Captain Burnham?” a familiar voice said warily, and Michael straightened to attention to face Joann Owosekun, leaning away from her cautiously. “Is everything… okay?”

“Everything is _fine_ ,” Michael muttered.

“The Emperor sent me to find you,” Owosekun said after a pause during which Michael pulled herself together. “If you’ll follow me?”

“Of course.”

To Michael’s surprise, they didn’t go to the same chambers where they had eaten dinner yesterday, which, she supposed, was why Owosekun had come to collect her. Instead they descended into the lower decks of the ship. Michael hadn’t been there yet, as she’d found Stamets on Deck 7.

She tried not to stare at the officers they passed, but there was a certain horribly apparent loss of glamor as they went down. Flashes of gold decreased significantly, and the lights got progressively dimmer, highlighting the grime on the floors and the worn fabric of the uniforms.

It was the underbelly of splendor.

An officer met Michael’s eyes before hurriedly looking away, demure, and Michael set her jaw. She wished there was something she could do to persuade this world that they were _wrong_ , that things didn’t have to be like this.

Owosekun stopped at a rather ominously large door, stepping to the side and setting her gaze to the middle distance. Michael squared her shoulders before going inside.

She had seen references to agonizers in her research on the Terran Empire, but the mild descriptions never could have prepared her for the nauseating crackle of sickly light paired with involuntary cries of exhausted pain. Michael stopped in her tracks as soon as the door shut with a clang behind her, staring at the rows of booths in numb silence.

“Michael!” Georgiou called pleasantly from one of the unshadowed sections of the massive room, face illuminated by the agonizer at such an angle that she looked like a ghost. Michael subconsciously pressed her hand against her chest, encouraging the way it made her choke.

“Mother,” she managed, unable to move.

“Forgive me for arranging such a distasteful meeting place. I know how you despise these things.”

She nodded, mechanical.

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” Georgiou tisked, striding elegantly through the booths until they stood facing each other. She patted Michael’s cheek fondly, and it felt like a burn on her skin.

“What is it that you wish to discuss?”

There was too much going on. Michael had to find Tilly. She had to stop looking to the Emperor like she was _her_ Philippa. She had to get off this fucking ship.

Georgiou sighed, rocking back on her heels with a wry twist to her lips. “Always business with you, my dear. I know you’ve been upset with me, but I’ve apologized. I’ve given you so many opportunities. How can you still be angry?”

“You are not allowed to _judge_ my emotions,” Michael snapped, the stress of the day taking its toll, but it seemed to work in her favor. Georgiou put up her hands, looking offended but unsurprised. “I will forgive you in my own time,” she added hastily.

“You have always had such a glorious temper and held such impressive grudges. It will suit you well when you become Emperor, but I won’t pretend that I love being on the wrong end of it.”

Michael said nothing in response, staring at her boots.

“Your cousin will be at tonight’s dinner,” Georgiou finally said, levelling Michael with an intense look. “I am providing you with an appropriate outfit for the occasion. Make me proud.”

Michael had no idea what the hell that meant, but she nodded anyway. “Of course, mother.”

Hopefully, she and Tilly could find a way out of here before dinner occurred. This universe was overflowing with such an excess of deceit that Michael supposed this conversation could be about the warp core, and she would have no idea.

Georgiou, at any rate, looked pleased. “Excellent. I will see you in the banquet hall in six hours.”

Michael’s heart skipped a beat. Only six hours? “Of course,” she said again, blank.

Georgiou touched her shoulder lightly before striding briskly from the room, and Michael stood frozen for a moment longer before following.

 

* * *

 

 

“Oh, god, Michael, where have you been?” Tilly blurted out immediately when Michael staggered into their room. Their surroundings were just as dim as they had been the night before, and Michael tiredly noted that the gloomy starlight did wonders in subtly highlighting the glow of Tilly’s hair. “I got out of there as soon as I could, but good god. The harder I tried to leave, the deeper I managed to get myself—like conversational quicksand or some shit. I’ve been here for, like, almost forty-five minutes trying to figure out how to find you, and some lady keeps comming me to ask when I’m going to see Stamets. I just—”

“The Emperor had to talk to me,” Michael mumbled, walking past Tilly into their dining room, which was dominated by a tasteful but ginormous glass table backlit by a massive window to the space beyond. She leaned a hip against the edge of the table and rubbed her eyes. “I came back as soon as I could.”

“Are you alright?” Tilly whispered in alarm, coming to stand so close that Michael’s breath caught, and her pulse stuttered, but Tilly only reached out to tentatively brush her fingers against a fading bruise on Michael’s cheekbone that she must have gotten at some point today.

“Sylvia, the other me is planning on assassinating the Emperor,” Michael said all at once. The words had been clogging her throat, and the breath wheezed into her lungs sharp and cold and unforgiving. “She had Stamets get enough data to make a plan as some sort of leverage—I don’t know—and—”

“We have to get out of here,” Tilly cut in gravely.

“I feel like I’m tap-dancing on a minefield every second I’m here,” Michael went on, crashing through Tilly’s statement. “The Emperor said something about me having a _cousin_ and there’s some code about a _dress_. I don’t understand _anything_. Captain Burnham—she—she’s got a lot of secrets. People are so afraid of her. I can’t be her.”

“You aren’t her. You’re just pretending.”

“It’s like I’m stuck in the sickest loop ever created,” Michael whispered, unable to stop talking. “I keep _killing_ her. I keep _betraying_ everyone. We’re not different at all. Don’t you get it?”

Tilly looked stricken for a moment. “Yeah. I get it.”

“And with you…” Michael trailed off, breathing harshly, trying to make herself _stop talking_.

“What—what about me?”

Michael couldn’t say what was roaring through her veins. She couldn’t say what hissed against that seal on her windpipe. She couldn’t say that Tilly was someone who should have never figured into the equation. She couldn’t say that every second they spent accidentally, clumsily, mistakenly _stumbling_ closer to one another left galaxies in her chest. She couldn’t say that she wanted what this other lawless Burnham had more than she wanted a chance for redemption.

“It’s not destiny,” she breathed, feeling totally illogical as she watched Tilly try to follow what she meant. “It can’t be.”

“Destiny is dumb,” Tilly said, eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “We’re not governed by anything other than ourselves.”

“Then how do you explain this?”

“Explain _what_?”

“Dangerous question.”

Tilly’s gaze was like every hot day on Vulcan combined. Michael shivered in spite of it. “Answer it.”

“No.”

Michael broke eye contact with extreme effort, and after a moment, Tilly slowly backed away to sit on the narrow ledge that bordered the dining room’s window, feet dangling. “You know, Michael, I wish you weren’t so afraid of letting yourself do what you think feels right.”

Michael had nothing to say to this. Her face felt hot, and she couldn’t tell if it was due to a struggle to hold back tears or skin-crawlingly vulnerable humiliation. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Tilly was about to say something else when Michael heard the door’s access code chirp happily. She looked up to see the access light turn green and didn’t pause to think before she pushed herself forward to stand in the V between Tilly’s legs, putting one hand on her hip and the other, warningly, on her forearm. “What’re you—” Tilly squeaked, but Michael shook her head once and let them lock eyes.

“Pretend,” Michael whispered, feeling morbidly ironic as she allowed a soft upward twist to curl her lips.

Tilly hesitated only an instant before laying her free arm over Michael’s shoulder, almost lazily. Her breath stuttered as she tried for a confident little smile that did not match the fear in her eyes. Michael wondered what she was so damn scared of, feeling like a hypocrite while the muted starlight painted them in soft golden light.

All of this happened in such quick succession that whoever was entering their quarters only just stepped inside by the time they were settled into position.

“Captain Burnham, Captain Tilly, I apologize for the interruption,” came Owosekun’s voice, and Michael looked sharply in her direction, as if only just noticing her. She narrowed her eyes, and Owosekun looked away. “I came only for your _delivery_.”

“You should learn to knock,” Michael said, pulling away from Tilly with a flash of illogical regret to investigate the delivery, which appeared to be an underwhelmingly nondescript plastic box.

“Yes, sir.”

Michael took the box from her. “Dismissed.”

“What is it?” Tilly asked, sounding slightly strained. She was still sitting on the ledge.

Michael flicked open the lid to stare down at the shockingly glamorous swath of gold fabric. She tentatively lifted it out of the box and continued to stare.

“It’s a dress,” Tilly said.

“Yes,” Michael agreed.

“I guess you have to put it on.”

“I guess I do.”

Neither of them moved.

“I’m going to go take a shower!” Tilly finally exclaimed, jumping to her feet. “You—uh—get dressed. We’ll—we’ll regroup after.”

“Okay,” Michael said, swiping a thumb over the very real-looking flakes of gold.

Ten minutes later, Tilly emerged from the bathroom to see Michael standing uncomfortably in front of their floor-length mirror, fidgeting with the dress. It was a form-fitting, revealing gown with tight sleeves that made her look much stronger than she was and, disconcertingly, had no straps. Michael stuck out her leg to watch the dress’s slit flatter her calf.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” she said faintly. “I feel like a sacrifice.”

“You look—good,” Tilly said, voice thin. “You’d be a good sacrifice.”

Michael glared at her through the mirror. “Thanks,” she said, flat.

“Did you find out what the Emperor meant with the dress?” Tilly asked, turning to open their closet and presumably find an outfit for herself.

Michael hiked up the dress’s skirt to show Tilly a strap designed to perfectly conceal a weapon. A dagger was graciously already latched to it. “The fabric is also designed to confuse body-scans. I suppose I’m meant to kill my cousin.”

“God, your family here sucks,” Tilly said, staring at the dagger with wide, glazed eyes.

“Did you come up with a plan?”

“Half of one.” She paused. "Should we contact the ship? Tell Captain Lorca?"

“Not yet. Let’s just get to work.”

 

* * *

 

 

The dinner was not so much a dinner as it was the fanciest gala Michael had ever attended.

She and Tilly stood back and watched the crowd of elegant guests _mingle_. They fell apart from everyone, effortlessly sinking into the shadows of the banquet hall despite their supposed importance.

At Michael’s side, Tilly wore a complementary silver gown that just so happened to be in their closet. It hugged her body like a second skin, not sparkling opulently like Michael’s but still catching the dismal light like a dying firefly. If Michael were a weaker person, she may have been distracted.

As it was, she watched the crowd intently, waiting for the Emperor to appear.

 _If_ she was being tasked to kill her cousin, Georgiou would surely want to provide some sort of subtle cue (assuming she was anything like Michael’s Philippa). That was when they would put their plan in action.

Noticing the tension in Michael’s shoulders, Tilly put a hand on the exposed small of her back. It was a comforting force, and they nodded at each other.

They were a low-ranking engineer and a disgraced scientist, and they were going to _succeed_.

They could do this.

Georgiou did not require a grand entrance in order to steal the hall’s attention. She glided into the fray with grace that sent the crowd into awed silence. Georgiou smiled at the room.

“Thank you all for attending this dinner. I do apologize for providing such late notice, but I am certain you will find this evening worth any cancelled plans. I will, of course, get into that later. For now, simply relax and enjoy your drinks.”

Everyone saluted in chilling unison, looking far too casual about it.

Michael and Tilly exchanged a glance. They had a pretty good idea about what the Emperor was talking about—she had to be planning on revealing her plans regarding the spore drive, and they both knew that if they didn’t bring everything to a stop before then, they would fail not only these two universes but possibly _all_ universes.

They had two main goals for the night: stop the Emperor and get back to the _Discovery_.

“Are you ready for this?” Michael asked Tilly in a low voice.

“I’ve never been ready for anything, ever.”

Michael smiled, feeling strangely calm in the face of all that they had to do. “Dance with me.”

“Okay.”

The dancefloor was sparsely populated, and Michael felt like the moment could have even been vaguely _private_ if she wasn’t so aware of the covert glances sent in their direction. She tried to ignore the attention, settling a hand on Tilly’s waist in the human style while Tilly laid her hand on Michael’s back.

“People are watching.”

“We’re the Empire’s most notorious power couple. Of course they’re watching,” Michael murmured, leaning close to Tilly’s ear.

“I guess we are.”

Michael leaned back a little bit so that Tilly could see her smile. “We’re gonna be okay, Sylvia.”

Tilly offered a slightly wobbly smile in return. “Yeah, maybe we are.”

They got maybe halfway through dancing to a second song before the speakers whined with bad feedback and cut off. Michael and Tilly pulled away from each other, startled.

“Now, this _is_ a nice party,” came a loud, gruff drawl. Michael looked sharply in its direction and distantly heard a glass shatter as someone dropped their drink. “What’s the occasion, Pippa?”

“Gabriel?” Georgiou said, eyebrows shooting up, looking more annoyed than surprised. “What is the meaning of this?”

Lorca grinned, eyes flicking towards Michael before returning his attention to the Emperor, phaser aimed. “I’m here for destiny,” he said.

“You bastard,” Georgiou whistled, sounding vaguely impressed. She widened her stance. “Your destiny is to die. _Again_ , as it so happens.”

“Maybe. But it’s also to kill _you_.”

The blasphemy of the situation hit Michael like a tidal wave. “No,” she said, loud enough to draw everyone’s attention.

“Don’t interrupt me, darlin’,” Lorca said, turning his phaser on her and pulling the trigger.


	4. Part II: Sync

Sylvia swatted at the sparkly cloud in vain, gagging and coughing against its inevitable goal to shoot down her throat. “Gross,” she sputtered, trying to convince herself that the sparkles did _not_ taste like human sweat.

 _I see you only consider us “human” when you can use it to play the victim_ , Oth’s voice echoed from inside her head.

“You judgy bitch,” Sylvia shouted, wishing she could punch something. “Get the fuck out of my head.”

 _This is the only way we can help you find your wife_.

“I change my mind! I don’t want your help!”

 _Too bad_.

“You guys _suck_ ,” Sylvia said emphatically.

 _Tholos are not bound to their bodies like we are_ , Oth went on, unbothered by Sylvia’s anger. _They ascribe to a very different lifestyle_.

“I don’t care,” Sylvia said. “Just take me to them.”

 _Very well, your grace_.

Sylvia pushed her way out of the stupid hippie tent and found herself facing a whole-ass tent civilization. “Great,” she muttered.

 _This way_ , Oth said, and Sylvia reluctantly followed its directions, which blessedly entailed minimal contact with other Sronks. She found herself outside of the tent city in a forest of rocky trees with shimmering, kaleidoscopic leaves that became denser with each step until she could no longer see the sky.

“You know, your dumb world would be kinda pretty if you guys weren’t so annoying.”

 _Then, wipe us out. Turn our planet into a resort for trivial human recreation. Our bodies are our greatest vessels, but there are an infinite amount of us to occupy and survive_.

Disturbed, Sylvia said nothing.

 _We have seen your lives, Sylvia Tilly, and we know your synchronization. You are not a creature bred for destruction, no matter how desperately you try to be_.

“Where is this Tholo civilization anyway?” she cut in, loudly, feeling horrifically ashamed.

_Beneath the skin of the world_

“Try again, wannabe deadbeat English professor.”

Oth’s voice sighed in exasperation. _Do you see that “tree”? On the horizon?_

“The big one?”

 _Yes. That is where we will lead you_.

The tree towered over the others enough to be remarkable, its crumbling rock-based trunk as wide as the _Discovery’s_ saucer. Sylvia battled fiercely against the powerful urge to marvel at it, at its lovely halo of rainbow light. It looked like the type of divine structure that would lead wayward souls to heaven—not into the bowels of the planet.

_In Tholo culture, the roots would be the most important part of the tree_

“Not yours?” Sylvia asked absently, distracted by a six-winged bird that almost took her head off with how low it flew. It probably thought her hair was a nest, she reflected, annoyed.

 _Look at the tree and tell me that the roots will save it. It is the leaves that five it life_ , Oth said sharply.

“In my world, roots do, too.”

 _It is a mutualistic existence,_ Oth allowed reluctantly, _but it would die without the leaves. Roots can be restored_.

“Weird logic, but alright.”

_Save your strength—do not waste it on conversation. The trek ahead is arduous._

Sylvia took the out as the minor blessing it was and shut up.

 

* * *

 

 

The tree was even bigger and more magnificent up close.

 _Now, you understand_ , Oth said smugly, and Sylvia rolled her eyes.

“How the hell do I get underground?”

_This way._

Sylvia stared down into the gloomy depths of the mouth of a cave an grimaced. Honestly, the _things_ she did for Michael Burnham.

 

* * *

 

 

In the end, locating Michael was not the issue.

The cave’s slope evened out, and Sylvia groped along the wall, feeling that it curved out into a wider chamber. She wished she could see.

 _That, at least, can be arranged_ , Oth said.

“What the hell are you—”

The shimmering sparkles that supposedly made up Oth And Friends forced their way up her throat, and Sylvia coughed wretchedly to get them the fuck out of her system.

“Thank god!” she rasped, massaging her neck. “You bitches taste like shit.”

Belatedly, she realized that the sparkles cast a muted light on their surroundings, and Sylvia followed them towards the center of the apparently massive chamber, trying to stay in the slim circle of light that they provided.

“Hey, slow down. Some of us have to walk, and you didn’t exactly give me shoes. My feet hurt. You’re messing with my body in all its sacred-ness or whatever you’re…”

Sylvia trailed off as they came to a stop, the sparkles hovering around a body laid on a relatively flat section of rock.

She dropped to her knees and grabbed Michael’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. It came steadily, and there was that, at least, but upon closer inspection, she saw that Michael’s leg was bent at an unnatural angle, and her nose was bleeding sluggishly from a persistent head wound.

“Not too bad, huh, babe?” Sylvia whispered, sounding rather hysterical to the part of her brain that was vaguely present enough to account for that sort of thing. “Doc Whatshisname will fix you up in no time once we get back to the ship, okay? You’ll be—you’ll be—”

 _The body is a vessel_ , a decidedly non-Oth voice said, echoing loudly about the chamber, and Sylvia reached for a phaser that was not there. _When it dies, her soul will remain. Do not worry yourself_.

“I happen to like her body.”

 _So, you are Sronk_.

“I’m human, you dirtbag. I hope you’re not gonna give me any trouble when I leave with my fucking wife in the next five seconds.”

_Her body is out of sync with her soul. She must remain._

“Y’know,” Sylvia said, glaring into nothing, “I keep hearing that today. I’d really like to know what you motherfuckers mean by it because, frankly, I find it offensive.”

_You request the Tholo way?_

“The hell is that supposed to mean? I request you make this easy for me and let us go without struggle.”

 _We cannot do that. Michael Burnham must sync._ There was a very deliberate, weighty pause. _In fact, you would also benefit from a sync, Sylvia Tilly_.

Sylvia scowled, rising to a tense crouch. She meant to respond with something quippy that would let her fluidly leap into action, but what she said was, “ _I_ am the most synced person I know.”

 _Perhaps_.

“Oth, tell these fuckers to leave me alone,” Sylvia said, turning to the cluster of sparkles illuminating their small circle. “Tell them I’m cool.”

 _Sronks cannot communicate unless they are bodied_ , the Tholo voice said, sounding mildly disgusted. _They cannot help you_.

“But—”

_Do you wish to sync?_

“I wish to know what ‘the sync’ _is_. Stop being so damn ominous.”

 _Very well_.

Sylvia faltered, realizing what she had just said. “Wait—”

 

* * *

 

 

Sylvia stood up, engulfed in the most profound, debilitating heat she had ever felt. “Oh, god,” she croaked, flinging an arm over her eyes to block out the accompanying oppressive sunlight. A hot, dry cut of wind threw a battering of stinging dust at her exposed arms, and Sylvia hissed more in surprise than in pain.

After a moment, she lowered her arm, squinting at the overwhelmingly red surroundings.

Vulcan, she noted in shock. She was on _Vulcan_.

“Sylvia?”

She whirled around at Michael’s voice, ready to grab her and get out of there, but she froze at the sight before her. Michael stood two stories above her on a glass balcony, barefoot. She wore heavy, long-sleeved Vulcan robes and did not seem to be breaking a sweat, looking somehow more natural and relaxed than Sylvia had _ever_ seen her. She was frowning at her in confusion.

“Michael?”

“What are you doing here? You don’t…” Here, she looked away, delicately placing her hand on her forehead. “I…”

“Why the hell are we on Vulcan?” Sylvia said, walking over to a narrow staircase that led up to the odd glass balcony. She raced up the steps, sliding to a stop at Michael’s side. Michael did not respond, staring out at the vast emptiness of the Vulcan desert.

“This is where I grew up,” Michael murmured after a long time. Her eyes flicked in Sylvia’s direction for an instant, and she curved her gaze away to avoid eye contact with Sylvia. “You were never supposed to…”

Sylvia tentatively laid a hand on Michael’s back, distantly surprised that the cloth was not damp with sweat. _God_ , it was hot. “Babe, we have to find a way out of here. You’re injured. You—”

“Don’t talk to me about what we have to do,” Michael interrupted, sharp, curling her fingers tight on the prismatic glass railing, and _there_ was the Michael that Sylvia knew. “Don’t talk to me about—about—”

“We can’t stay here.”

Michael hunched her shoulders and shifted, finally looking up at Sylvia. Her expression was not cold and cruel, as Sylvia had come to expect, but crumbling, almost stricken. “Of course we can’t,” she whispered hoarsely, bitterly. “Of _course_ not.”

“Michael,” Sylvia breathed, bringing her other hand up to the side of her face, searching her gaze. “What happened to you?”

Michael gently grabbed Sylvia’s wrist and pulled her hand away, placing it on the railing. “You were never supposed to find out.”

“Who’s out there?” a woman called, and it was suddenly as if Sylvia did not exist. Michael’s spine went ramrod straight, her face dropped any sign of emotion whatsoever, and the tension in her muscles skyrocketed. It was like flipping a switch. Michael turned her back to the railing to face whoever it was, and Sylvia thought, distantly, that she looked like a perfect propaganda poster for the Vulcan resistance, minus the ears.

A woman stepped out onto the balcony from the nondescript building to which it was attached. She wore vibrant crimson robes and a jet-black headscarf, a striking contrast to Michael’s washed-out gray robes.

The woman came to an abrupt halt. “Michael?”

Michael opened her mouth to reply, but instead of providing a measured response, she gave a fine, full-body shudder and closed her mouth with a painful-sounding clack of teeth.

“You came back,” the woman went on, stepping forward to place her hands on Michael’s shoulders. “You returned for us.”

Although the woman’s grip looked gentle, Michael buckled under her force, collapsing hard to her knees on the balcony floor. She bowed her head, exposing her neck to the woman above with such lack of hesitation that Sylvia took an involuntary step back.

“Amanda, I failed you,” she gasped.

The woman, Amanda, cocked her head. “Sweetheart, what are you talking about?”

Michael sagged forward, pressing her hands absolutely flat against the ground. “I—I just—I got—”

Sylvia had never seen Michael speechless.

Amanda slowly crouched to kneel in front of her, stroking a hand through Michael’s hair. Michael’s full-body shudder was more obvious this time. “You did what you had to do.”

“Sarek is _dead_ because of _me._ I couldn’t stop her. I shouldn’t have—She ordered me to kill the rebels, Amanda, and I didn’t try to save them. I did _nothing_.”

Amanda withdrew her hand, expression going blank in an eerily familiar way. “You could have stopped it?”

Michael looked up for the first time in several moments. “I—I didn’t try hard enough. I’m so—”

“Oh, Michael. What have we done to you?” Amanda murmured, sounding pained. “No one should ever have so much riding on their shoulders for so long.”

Michael was quiet for a moment, eyes squeezed shut. “I got lost,” she finally said, like a confession. “I got really, _really_ lost.”

“Nothing is ever truly lost, my dear.”

Michael shook her head wordlessly, voice incredibly strained when she said, “I don’t think I can be your messiah.”

“I never wanted a messiah,” Amanda corrected, tone soft. She reached out to touch Michael’s chin, guiding her to look up. Miraculously, it worked. “Only justice.”

Michael’s eyes went cold—and at least this was something that Sylvia knew. By Amanda’s little flinch, she did not. “I will never know true justice.”

“Then, perhaps, mere vengeance must suffice.”

Michael turned her head to the side, trying to escape Amanda’s unrelenting kindness, but she did not otherwise move. “I just…”

“Your _katra_ is poisoned,” Amanda said sadly. “You decay alive like a rotting corpse, and yet you still refuse to put your love for that _woman_ aside.”

“She is my mother,” Michael said, hollow.

“She murdered your parents and sent you away to be educated on Vulcan. Michael, my dear, what binds you to her?”

“Simplicity,” Michael said, sounding breathtakingly honest.

“I taught you everything I know,” Amanda said. “I will have failed you in all the ways that matter if you continue down the easy path for the remains of your life.”

“I can’t save all of you, even if I get my revenge.”

Amanda smiled, sad. “This world is a cruel, ungrateful place. Sometimes, the price of doing anything worthwhile is to do it alone.”

At this, Amanda glanced in Sylvia’s direction for the first time and inclined her head in wary acknowledgement. Sylvia pressed her hands so tightly against the railing that she felt the skin slice open and bleed.

Michael’s hands stopped pressing so hard against the ground, and her fingers loosely curled into her palms. She looked at Amanda for a long moment before saying, “If there is anything I know, it is loneliness.”

“Atta girl,” Amanda murmured, looking remarkably sad.

They made a sickening picture, Sylvia thought vaguely. The two of them crouched before one another in antithetical curves of grief on a glass balcony, little casts of rainbow prisms playing across their features under the red, red sky. Sylvia turned away, feeling a little bit nauseated.

“Why did you show me this?” she hissed at the sky, hoping that somehow the Tholos would hear her. “Is this some kind of _joke_?”

 _It is Michael Burnham’s sync_.

Sylvia closed her eyes. This had to be fake. It had to be some sort _trick_ to get them to—to—

“Get me out of here.”

 _You will sync as well_.

“Wait, _no_ —”

 

* * *

 

 

Sylvia opened her eyes, and she was standing in the throne room of the San Francisco palace, a crowd full of heavily-decorated officers staring at her. They formed an oval around her, watching from the outside.

She glanced down at herself to take note that she was still in the dumb yellow dress instead of her own uniform. She scowled. _Michael_ had gotten a situation-appropriate outfit for _her_ weird vision thing. Perhaps this all pointed to the possibility that the whole experience was only being experienced by her, and Michael was merely unconscious in a cave somewhere while Sylvia tripped out on sparkly aliens. On the other hand, maybe the Tholos just didn’t like her.

Everything started to happen at once.

“Captain Sylvia Tilly, is _this_ your first officer?” the Emperor said, shoving a disheveled Commander Rhys to his knees and placing her boot on his back to shove him forward, into the wide ellipse of bare space in the middle of the throne room. Rhys kept his head down, but Sylvia saw a drop of blood hit the meticulously white tile below his head.

“Yes,” Sylvia said, numb.

“Commander Rhys, you have been accused with the grave offense of _treason_. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

“No,” Rhys said, looking up at Sylvia, eyes blazing with a wordless conviction that she absolutely did not deserve, and Sylvia’s breath hitched at the sudden knowledge that he would go to his death for her without complaint.

“What did he do?” Sylvia demanded, voice hoarse. “What—what sort of treason did he—”

The Emperor flicked a cool look towards her, fiddling with the hilt of her sword. “He subverted direct orders from the throne itself in order to stabilize life support on a deck of unessential personnel aboard _your_ ship. The delay resulted in a catastrophic loss against the rebellion.”

Sylvia stared at Rhys, and Rhys stared back, gaze unrelenting. He raised his chin, and Sylvia watched as the corner of his mouth ticked up for just an instant.

“You’re wrong,” she said, watching Rhys’s jaw go slack with shock in dull satisfaction.

“Excuse me?”

She tore her eyes away from Rhys to survey the room, noting the presence of all the relevant esteemed figures in front of her. She paused when she saw Michael. Her wife was a stranger, looking at her with the same dispassionate intensity that she normally reserved for a strange new equation.

Sylvia had imagined the kind of role Michael would play in her demise. She had imagined all sorts of ways Michael would dispose of her after finding her weakness for her crew. She had envisioned _so many_ breeds of betrayal.

None were as crushing as the condemning distance Michael took here, not even an active role in her downfall.

Behind Sylvia, the _Discovery’s_ crew was gathered, waiting to see what happened with wide eyes and unnaturally straight posture. Sylvia did not turn to look at them before making eye contact with the Emperor.

“It was me. Commander Rhys tried to take the fall because I threatened to kill him otherwise.” She forced a cavalier shrug. “I subverted the order. I cost your victory.”

The Emperor scowled. “Don’t play _games_ , Sylvia.”

Sylvia smirked with an arrogance that she did not feel. “Did I stutter?”

The moment stretched out, and tension crackled between them as they remained silent, both searching for signs of weakness and uncertainty in the other.

“Take her into custody,” the Emperor finally said. “I will kill her myself.”

“Captain, _no_ ,” Rhys gasped, but he was drowned out by the sudden roar of disturbed murmurs overtaking the room.

Sylvia offered no resistance when the guards grabbed her, movements rough. The profound disgrace of the moment struck her, and she inhaled shakily, trying to get a handle on the beginnings of panic.

Rhys shoved through the crowd to face her in one blurred moment. He shook his head, already grieving, and said, “You couldn’t have let me do this one thing for you.”

“No,” Sylvia said simply, because it really was as simple as that.

“ _Why?_ ”

“It’s never been about me, Commander. Take care of the crew.”

And, curiously, the panic went away as Rhys was lost in a sea of golden uniforms.

 

* * *

 

 

Dazed, Sylvia sat down heavily, not registering the painful way that the rocky floor dug into her bones. She rubbed her forehead, trying to orient herself.

“God, you stupid things are… stupid,” she mumbled half-heartedly.

_You are welcome._

Sylvia wrinkled her nose and struggled to come up with some sort of insult, but her thought process was interrupted when Michael made a small noise of discomfort. She watched, face blank, as Michael slowly stirred into consciousness, raising a hand to touch the dried blood on her face. She did not vocalize any sort of discomfort, even when her other hand fluttered down to her broken leg in realization of its sorry state.

She really was a little bit Vulcan.

Sylvia noticed the moment that Michael realized she wasn’t alone. She did not provide any indication other than going very still for a beat before pushing herself into a sitting position, subtly curled away from Sylvia.

There was so much between them, but Sylvia could not think of a single thing to say other than, “You lied to me.”

Michael scoffed. “Everyone has secrets.”

“So, that was all real?”

Michael finally turned to look at her. “I don’t know. Would you really betray the Empire like that?”

Sylvia set her jaw and said, “Are you really a rebel?”

Michael’s smile was emotionless and frightening. “Even with everything laid bare, you _still_ deny what we are.”

“And what do you suppose that is?” Sylvia said, tone low.

Michael did nothing for a long, long time. When she finally broke from her stillness, it was to gracefully push herself to her feet, putting all of her weight on her unbroken leg but otherwise showing no indication that she was injured. She took a sweeping look at the darkness around them as if she could see into the depths of the gloom.

They first met on an abandoned starbase, Sylvia suddenly recalled. In the light of its dying star, she had thought that Michael looked like the most wicked blessing she could have ever encountered. Here, beneath the surface of an alien planet in a strange universe, hugged by the dismal light, Michael stood like she had the weight of the galaxy on her shoulders. She was an inherently divine and inherently damned image all at once.

Sylvia was still on the ground, always, _always_ at Michael’s feet.

“We do not belong in the world that made us,” Michael finally said, and she wasn’t even looking at her. She was looking out into the unknown depths of the cave, seeing things that Sylvia could only guess at. “Stop pretending that we do.”

When Michael allowed herself to look at Sylvia again, her heart leapt into her throat in all the wrong ways.

They looked at each other like years of nothing marked time between them, like they had never made promises to each other, like they had been reduced to collapse back into the first moment Sylvia had seen Michael and had thought, _Oh, hell_.

They were strangers.


	5. Part 3.0: Death Wish

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for some pretty intense self-destructive tendencies.

Michael woke up, limbs bunched together in such a way that told her she’d been shoved into an extremely cramped space. She blinked groggily, trying to come to her senses.

She was in an inactive agonizer booth.

When she’d been in here before, the chorus of misery in the massive chamber had been the most sickening thing about it. Now, there was only silence, and Michael’s gut clenched at the thought that all of the prisoners had been released.

She tried to push herself upright and gasped in pain, suddenly remembering that she had been _shot_. She looked down at herself, no longer in the glittering dress, stripped down to the sleeveless black undershirt and short leggings she had been wearing beneath the garment.

The shirt was tacky with dried blood.

At least the wound had closed, she reflected dizzily, pressing a shaking hand flat against a glass wall as she looked around, evaluating whether or not she was truly alone.

She was.

Breathing out a small sigh of relief, Michael struggled to gather herself into an upright position, pausing to breathe through the pain at short increments until she was semi-standing, leaning heavily against the side of the booth.

She had to find some way to get the hell out of here.

As she was feeling around the booth for any signs of weakness, the enormous door clanged open, and Ellen Landry strode inside with all the bored confidence that Michael remembered form her.

“You…” Michael rasped when Landry came to a stop before her.

“I’m going to make this very quick,” Landry said, voice low enough to avoid the room’s natural echo. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get you out of this sooner, but you were still unconscious.”

Mind going blank with fizzling shock, Michael stared as Landry hit some buttons next to the booth, and the door slid open. She took a wobbly step forward, briefly losing her balance before Landry stepped forward to steady her.

“I thought you were working for Lorca,” Michael mumbled suspiciously.

“I was working for Lorca _and_ you,” Landry said with an eye roll. “Honestly, Burnham, he must’ve shot you worse than I thought if you ever assumed I’d take his side over yours.”

“But—but you—” Michael could not reconcile this with her universe’s Landry. She dully realized that this universe’s Lorca had been “executed” for treason, and that Landry was suggesting that they had once worked together, but everything was a jumbled mess in her exhausted mind.

“I’d rather see you than him on that throne any day of the week,” Landry said, firm. “Now, come on. Let’s get out of here before he realizes what I’ve done.”

Michael shut up for the time being and let herself be dragged along dark corridors that all blurred together. “Would anyone else defect from Lorca’s side?” she asked when Landry paused behind a column.

She glanced at Michael, expression unreadable. “Hard to say. Discussions of loyalty always feel unnecessarily performative to me.”

Well, that was one way of putting it.

“Lorca has all the big names rounded up in the banquet hall as hostages, which is just stupid. Neither you nor the Emperor _really_ care if they survive. Honestly, I don’t know where his head is.”

“How is he alive?” Michael wondered out loud.

“That bastard’s a slug.” She shrugged. “I didn’t see the execution, so I don’t know.”

Maybe Lorca’s execution had been a work of propaganda, but that just didn’t make sense, considering his treason had been years’-old news by the time he was supposedly killed by the Emperor.

Unless, _a_ Lorca really _had_ died, just not the Lorca of this universe.

Michael did some quick calculations. The article regarding his execution had been published just a month after the _Buran_ exploded.

“Oh, god,” she whispered, feeling sick.

“What?”

Michael shook her head wordlessly. She had to contact the _Discovery_. She had to find Tilly. “Have you seen Captain Tilly anywhere?”

Landry rolled her eyes. “She’s at large on this ship, as far as I know. I had bigger problems to worry about.”

“And the Emperor?”

“She’s slimy, I’ll give her that. She and Lorca have been trash-talking each other over the intercom for the past several hours.”

Michael rubbed her eyes in exhaustion. What a mess. “I’m assuming you’ve got a plan?”

“Aye, sir.”

She nodded. “Then, let’s get to it.”

Landry grinned. “First, we gotta pay a little visit to the mushroom man.”

 

* * *

 

 

“I thought I told you to do it literally any other night than tonight!” Stamets exclaimed, emerging from the ominous gloom of his garden, phaser aimed.

“It wasn’t me, to be fair, but it’s really not your concern what I do with your data,” Michael snapped.

Landry flicked her wrist, and a little disc shot in Stamets’ direction. It sent out a pulse, and they heard the whine of his phaser die. “Just say the word, Cap, and I’ll kill him.”

“Not yet.”

Stamets held up his hands in surrender. “What more could you want from me?”

“I need the access code to the _Charon’s_ spore drive.”

“What spore drive? I only put one on the—”

“Cut the bullshit.”

Stamets scowled. “Can’t a guy have _any_ secrets?”

Michael and Landry exchanged a glance. “No,” they said in unison.

“How about a little deal?” he suggested with forced nonchalance, taking a step closer. Landry flicked her phaser’s intensity up, and he faltered. “You kill me, and you get no spore drive.”

“What do you want?”

Stamets smirked, sensing that he had at least _some_ amount of leverage. “You escort me safely to an escape pod, and I’ll tell you.”

“Coward.”

“I’m a survivor. Call me what you will, but I am _getting out of this_.”

Michael almost wanted to tell Landry to shoot him just for the presumptuousness of that statement, but she had more self-control than that. She nodded at Landry, who then stepped forward to press her phaser to the Stamets’ jugular. “One wrong move, buddy.”

“ _Ow_ ,” he whined, but they both ignored him, dragging him out into the corridor where Michael paused once more to lay her hand against her phaser wound, breathing shakily.

There was a bay of escape pods on Deck 1 that Lorca likely didn’t know about or care about, so Michael headed for the nearest Jefferies tube to climb down.

“Ladies first,” Stamets said when Michael opened the hatch, but Landry shoved him into the tube roughly. “Jeez, _okay_ , enough.”

Michael climbed in last, body immediately beginning to tremble with exertion. Black spots danced in her eyes, but she breathed through it and began the slow descent. She mentally thanked Amanda for making her take all those _Suus Mahna_ classes—the discipline did wonders for her ability to circumvent pain.

She wanted to cry in relief when she heard Stamets thud clumsily to the ground some short distance below her. Landry landed softly afterwards, and she heard Stamets hiss in pain.

“Freeze, you traitorous douchebags.”

Michael, still safe in the Jefferies tube, froze.

“Alright, slow your roll, Captain,” Landry drawled, unconcerned. “You may want to cool it with the insults considering one of these traitorous douchebags is your—”

Michael scrambled down the last few rungs and dropped heavily to the ground. “Tilly!”

“—wife.”

Tilly stood before Stamets and Landry, phaser aimed and unwavering even when she saw Michael. She had changed out of her dress from the gala into an ensign uniform, her hair swept up into a tight high ponytail. “Michael?” she whispered.

Michael strode towards her and did not stop to think before collapsing into her, throwing her arms around Tilly in a dizzy embrace. “Thank god I found you,” she mumbled.

“Michael?” Tilly said again, hands coming up to support her weight more than return the hug. “I thought—I thought you were _dead_.”

“Surprise?”

“You…” Tilly trailed off, leaning back so that she could look at her, eyes wide and restless. Then, she tilted forward to press their foreheads together, and Michael’s eyes involuntarily fluttered shut. “ _God_.”

Tilly couldn’t seem to decide where to put her hands, one minute on the back of Michael’s head, the next at her shoulders, then her waist, then hips, then back again. Michael let her silently freak out for another moment before reaching back to grab one of her hands. She’d had some sort of plan when she’d decided to do that but ended up just holding it tightly, while Tilly’s other hand stilled at her waist.

“Not to be a huge boner-killer, Cap, but we’re on a schedule,” Landry said, voice cutting into the moment like a scythe.

Michael cocked her head and ended up nudging her nose against Tilly’s as she pulled away, relishing in her small sigh. She turned to Landry before she could stop and think about Tilly’s vaguely disappointed expression. “Right. Let’s go.”

“Where?” Tilly asked.

“Escape pods.”

“But, uh—”

“Not for us,” Michael said quickly. She nodded at Stamets, who offered a grumpy little wave.

“Oh. Hey, man.”

Stamets glared at her. “Hello, evil witch.”

“Harsh.”

Landry rolled her eyes and shoved Stamets in the direction of the escape pods, cutting off the interaction before things got out of hand. Tilly and Michael trailed behind them. Michael was still unarmed in her underclothes and felt unnecessarily vulnerable

“Have you been working alone down here?” Michael asked in a low tone.

Tilly frowned. “No. I found those cadets that I was talking to earlier today—I guess yesterday, technically—and took charge of the lower decks with them. The Emperor and Lorca are mostly battling it out in the upper decks.”

Michael furrowed her brows. “They haven’t sent _anyone_ down here?”

“Not as far as I know.”

Now, _that_ just didn’t make sense. A smaller, more infrequent patrol was what she expected as a form of negligence, but _nothing_?

If she’d learned anything in her time as Captain Burnham, that was just not the Terran way.

“Who’d you make a deal with, Sylvia?” Michael said, trying to keep any sense of emotion out of her voice. “I need to know.”

Tilly slid a guilty look her way, eyes flicking down to the front of her shirt where her phaser wound was subtly visible. “Georgiou,” she finally said. “She got me out of the banquet hall when you were…”

Michael nodded. “Okay. I suppose we can work with that.”

“Michael, I’m sorry I didn’t—”

“Don’t.”

Tilly sighed gustily. “Fine.”

“We need to contact the _Discovery_. Can you handle that?”

Bristling, Tilly said, “You know I can.”

“Good. Tell them what we know about Captain Lorca, and tell them to get in range for transportation but out of range of an explosion.”

Tilly didn’t even blink at the reference to Lorca’s betrayal. Apparently, she’d already figured it out. “You gonna tell me the rest of the plan?”

“No time,” Michael said, keeping her tone as gentle as possible. “Just keep that transponder on you at all times.”

“You mean, the transponder that _Lorca_ gave us, knowing that he was going to attempt some sort of coup?”

“Alright. Point taken.”

“I’ll contact the ship, but I need to know the plan after that, okay?”

“Okay. Fine.”

Tilly hesitated before stopping them in the hallway, leaning in to press a quick kiss to Michael’s cheek. “I’ll meet you at the escape pods.” And then she was gone.

Michael blinked a few times, feeling dumb, before Landry snapped something at Stamets, and she broke out of her funk, jogging forward to catch up with them.

“Where’s your woman?” Stamets asked as soon as she was close. He sneered. “Is that disloyalty I sense?”

“She’s doing something for me that doesn’t concern you,” Michael said absently, watching as Landry watched her with a frown. “What?”

“Nothing, Cap,” Landry said.

Michael doubted that, but she had to prioritize now. “Okay.”

They reached the escape pods, and Landry shoved Stamets into one at random, keeping her phaser on him.

“Problem. They cut the power,” Landry said.

“I’ll handle it. Get him to talk.”

It took Michael eleven and a half minutes to hack into the system and rig the pods to launch at her command without alerting anyone who might be watching the ship’s power activity. It was a sloppy job, but hopefully no one would be paying close attention.

“How about a little bit of insurance?” Landry said.

“What is this, a bank deal?” Stamets said, nostrils flaring.

Landry ignored him and casually pulled a data chip out of her pocket. The effect of the move was immediate—Stamets blanched and lurched forward before belatedly aborting the movement, hands up.

“Where’d you get that?”

“You’re not as slick as you like to think.” Landry very deliberately put the data chip into a zippered compartment on her thigh. “Now, I’m just gonna keep this while you go save yourself, and I’ll give it back to you after I survive this night. So, where’s the spore drive and what’s the access code?”

Stamets grimaced and visibly deflated, collapsing back to a seat in the far end of the escape pod. “Throne room. You need the Emperor’s sword to access it.”

“Atta boy,” Landry said, pleased as she turned to look at Michael in triumph. “We’re done here.”

They watched Stamets’ escape pod launch out into space and disappear into a tiny dot.

“What’s on the data chip?” Michael asked.

“Some dumb secret research, I think. I don’t care.” Landry turned to look at Michael, eyes blazing. “You’re not her, are you?”

Michael blinked once in surprise. “Excuse me?”

“Who the hell _are_ you?”

Warily, Michael swept her eyes over Landry. She was very deliberately relaxed, arms crossed to put her hands nowhere near her phaser holster. Michael probably could’ve grabbed it just as easily as Landry, given how close they were standing. “I’m Michael Burnham,” she said slowly.

“Just not _my_ Michael Burnham,” Landry agreed.

Eyebrows furrowing, Michael asked, “What is she to you?”

At this, Landry looked away, jaw clenching and unclenching. “She’s just someone I believe in.”

They must be close, Michael figured. Landry was the only person who had caught on to the lie, and it hadn’t even taken her an hour.

“So, if I have to help you survive to get her back, I’ll give you the same dedication I’d give her,” Landry added, squaring her shoulders. She stuck out her right hand. “I won’t tell anyone. Deal?”

Michael examined her for a long moment, weighing her options. In the end, there wasn’t really a choice at all. She shook Landry’s hand. “Deal.”

“You do have a way of getting her back, right?” Landry asked, shifting her weight restlessly.

“Yes.”

It was an exaggeration. Michael _assumed_ that everything would be fixed once they went back to their own universe, but Landry didn’t need to contend with her uncertainties. “Good,” she sighed, sagging slightly in relief.

“Listen, I need to ask you a favor.”

Landry was instantly back to business. “Anything.”

Michael took a deep breath and explained her new plan.

 

* * *

 

 

Tilly arrived and didn’t bother wasting any time before saying, “Message received. The _Discovery_ will be in range in an hour.”

“We can work with that,” Michael said.

She shot a wary glance at Landry (who rolled her eyes) before saying, “They said to—uh—forgo approval via laser pen?”

Michael nodded, instantly recognizing Saru’s code. “They just don’t want us using the transponders. That shouldn’t be a problem.”

Tilly didn’t look extraordinarily surprised. “Paul’s waking up, too.” She shot a furtive look at Landry.

“Don’t get your panties in a twist, honey. I know you’re not _you_.”

Tilly turned to Michael, mouth opened in a small O. “Did you _tell_ her?”

“She guessed.” Michael shrugged. “Swore loyalty, though. Come on. We don’t have time for this.”

“I believe I was promised _the plan_ ,” Tilly said, clearly frustrated, as they started away from the escape pods.

“I’ll fill you in on the way,” Michael agreed, very carefully _not_ looking at Landry.

“On the way where?”

“To our quarters. I need my uniform if any of this is going to work.”

Tilly stared at her, incredulous. “Jesus, Michael,” she whispered. “How deep does your death wish actually go?”

Michael closed her eyes for a moment, thinking about clamps around her neck and blocks of ice in her lungs. “Sylvia,” she began, voice more exhausted than she could remember ever feeling.

“I, for one, like the plan,” Landry piped in before Michael could say anything she may regret.

“That’s because you came up with half of it.”

Landry shrugged. “Poh-tay-toh, Poh-tah-toh.”

Tilly rubbed a hand over her face. “Alright. Hit me.”

 

* * *

 

 

When they got to Deck 12, everything was much too quiet.

They expected trouble, of course. A large part of the plan’s design _required_ trouble, but it was meant to be a controlled sort of trouble.

After they finally got a visual on their quarters, Michael almost gave into the impulse to slap her forehead in frustration.

It was so heavily guarded that Michael nearly conceded the necessity of her uniform right then and there.

“What is Lorca’s deal with you?” Tilly whispered once they ducked out of earshot.

She had been looking at Michael, but it was Landry who answered. “He’s in love with her.” They both turned to stare at her in shock, and she arched an eyebrow. “Don’t act like it’s such a mind-boggling concept.” She nodded at Tilly. “You’re in love with her, too, aren’t you?”

“Uh—”

“Anyway, it works to our advantage. It just makes him dumb when it comes to you.”

Uncomfortable, Michael tried not to go through every single interaction she’d ever had with Lorca in this new light. “…Right,” she said, knowing that she was grimacing despite herself.

Landry snorted, punching Michael in the shoulder. “I think I’m starting to see how you two are the same person,” she said, eyes dancing.

Michael decided not to think about _that_ at all.

“How are we gonna get in?” Tilly asked, interrupting the moment.

“I got this,” Landry said and, without further ado, slipped from their hiding place to talk to the swarm of Terrans.

Michael and Tilly looked at each other in alarm. “She’s something, alright,” Tilly muttered, and Michael failed in smothering a smile.

“Hey, _dicknoses_ ,” Landry snapped, and they shifted so that they could watch Lorca’s soldiers snap to attention. “Didn’t you fucking hear the announcement? Boss wants you searching the lower decks for Killy.”

“Commander,” the guy who seemed to be in charge said. “The communicator activity on this level has been spotty—we’re guessing that the Emperor’s people are messing with the ship’s circuitry.”

“Do I look like I care? Get the fuck out of here. We’ve got eyes on Burnham, and there’s no way that Killy would be dumb enough to come here.”

The leader hesitated before nodding. “Aye, sir.”

When they had all disappeared in a rush of boots, Landry motioned them over.

“Wow,” Tilly said. “That was impressive.”

Smirking in triumph, Landry dusted imaginary dirt off her shoulders. “Oh, you know.”

Michael punched in the door’s access code, and they let out a collective sigh of relief when it chirped green and clicked open.

“I’ll stay out here in case anyone comes by. You two—no detours.”

And then Michael and Tilly were alone for the first time since before the banquet hall.

Michael didn’t waste any time before striding to the closet and snatching one of her uniforms. “You okay?” she asked, not looking in Tilly’s direction.

“Michael, I should be asking _you_ that. You’re the one with the fucking untreated phaser wound.” When Michael refused to dignify that with a response, Tilly sighed. Out of the corner of her eye, Michael saw her collapse onto the edge of the bed. “Honestly, this whole thing seems to revolve around you. Well—the _other_ you, I guess.”

Michael ruminated over this as she finished clasping the first layer of buckles. “She does seem to be in the center of everything that’s been going on.”

“I wonder why.”

Silently, Michael did, too. Her counterpart was engulfed in such a haze of secrecy that every time she stumbled upon a new layer, the web expanded logarithmically. “She wants to be Emperor. That much is clear.”

Tilly nodded thoughtfully. “What are you thinking?”

“I think,” Michael said slowly, fastening on her chest plate, “if I know myself at all—” (and she did; one didn’t spend so much time solitary in prison without knowing themselves like she did) “—then we should be afraid of what that would mean.”

Tilly stood, frowning. “But—”

“As far as I can tell, this Michael is who I would be if I had no sense of loyalty whatsoever, and that is a dangerous, dangerous thing,” Michael said, realizing the truth of her words as she spoke. “So, I think we should make sure Georgiou survives. She’s the only one who may stand a chance against her.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

Michael offered Tilly a ghost of a smile as she finished securing the uniform. She walked over to her and touched her face briefly. “I’m sorry you got dragged into this.”

Tilly stared down at Michael’s hand. “Well, I’m not. You shouldn’t have to do this alone.”

The vice on Michael’s throat clamped tighter, and her eyes burned. The life that she had made for herself, shaped by her decision at the Battle of the Binary Stars, was a solitary one. It was not built for the sort of ruthless kindness that Tilly offered, and Michael had no idea how to tell her this without sounding like a psychopath, so she said nothing.

“About time,” Landry muttered when they exited, pushing herself off the wall. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

 

* * *

 

 

Michael hacked into the intercom and said five words.

“Throne room in twenty minutes.”

She got no response, but she didn’t need one.

 

* * *

 

 

Michael and Tilly were not the first to arrive at the throne room. Lorca already stood behind the throne itself, one hand resting on top of the decadent chair’s back. He was apparently alone, but Michael knew better than to think he hadn’t brought back-up.

He looked up when they entered the room, footsteps echoing on the hard floor, and smiled. “Michael. I see you found a way out.”

“I am not as easy to contain as you may have hoped,” Michael agreed.

Lorca’s smile softened, and Michael internally flinched against it. “No. I suppose not.” He leaned forward, resting both of his elbows against the throne. “You look good in her uniform.”

Michael clenched her teeth together against the _wrongness_ of it all. “Don’t push your luck, _Captain_ ,” she said, tone icy.

“So, you’d still pick her over me?” he mused, eyes flicking to Tilly. Michael resisted the urge to step in front of her.

“Yes.”

“Shame.”

Michael’s eyes flicked around the throne room, searching for where the spore drive might me. Her gaze kept returning to the back wall behind the throne, where the metal plating of the wall protruded in an unnaturally bulbous mass that seemed totally out of place with the _Charon’s_ otherwise angular design.

It was at that moment that the Emperor swept into the throne room from another entrance, Owosekun and another man that Michael did not recognize at her back. Her eyes swept over the room. “I am gratified to see you alive,” she said to Michael. Michael’s eyes flicked to the sword at her hip, but she said nothing.

“Pippa, this isn’t your daughter.”

“Your attempts to seduce her away from me were unsuccessful,” Georgiou said without looking at him. “I almost pity you. Of course she is my daughter.”

Michael wondered if her counterpart saw it that way. She wondered what exactly her relationship was to these people and why it all seemed so _bad_ , for lack of a more specific term.

Lorca rolled his eyes and scoffed. “You know her even less than I gave you credit for.”

“Enough talking. Michael, why have you called us here?”

Michael inhaled evenly and straightened her shoulders, glancing between her two once-captains and feeling an overwhelming sense of melancholy. “For an honorable battle of succession, of course.”

“There is no honor with this insect,” Georgiou hissed at the same time that Lorca scoffed, “Give me a goddamn _break_.”

“You have been faced with a challenge,” Michael said to Georgiou. “You must defend your title.”

Georgiou scowled. “You and your _rules_ ,” she muttered.

Michael turned to Lorca. “And if you wish to take the throne, you must do it by simply being the best. You will not be a successful Emperor otherwise.”

“Well, well, well. Maybe you are a little bit Terran after all,” Lorca drawled, flashing a too-bright grin.

“Do I have your agreements?”

Georgiou and Lorca eyed each other suspiciously. Neither gave concrete confirmation, which Michael supposed was too much to hope for, but they did not continue to protest.

“You may each keep one weapon.”

Lorca laughed, and it was a throaty, awful thing. He tossed aside a phaser and dagger. “I don’t need weapons to kill _you_.”

Enraged, Georgiou immediately unsheathed her sword and shoved it into Owosekun’s fumbling grip. “You _dare_.”

And then they were fighting, hand-to-hand, like the barbaric ancient Vulcans had once done.

Owosekun was sufficiently distracted by the chaos before her that she was unprepared when Tilly stunned her with her phaser from behind. The other guard whirled in her direction and fired, but Tilly ducked the shot and snatched Georgiou’s sword from the floor. She was not so lucky the second time, and the shot grazed her arm. “Michael!” she shouted.

Michael was already running towards her. Tilly tossed her the sword, and for a moment, Michael thought that everything was about to go terrifically, horribly wrong, but she scrambled to catch it, gritting her teeth around the pain of a newly sliced-open palm, tears burning into her eyes before she could readjust her grip to the hilt.

She left Tilly behind to grapple with Georgiou’s guard, _praying_ that she would be okay, and skidded to a stop in front of the bulbous metal wall that had to be concealing the spore drive. Sure enough, Michael spotted a slot to slide the sword into. She hoped that Stamets hadn’t given them such false information and lunged for the slot.

“No!” Georgiou shouted, evidently noticing Michael’s deception. Lorca paused to glance in her direction, eyes narrowed in confusion as Michael twisted the sword.

The metal plating peeled back in a roar of mechanics, and Michael was suddenly _blinded_ by a poisonous red-green blur. Everything about the spore drive screamed _wrong_.

She had to overload it.

Something hot and _burning_ tore through Michael’s hamstring, and she gasped in pain, dropping to one knee as she fumbled for the source of the pain, finding the handle of a small knife embedded between a chink in her armor. She risked a glance behind her to see Georgiou stalking towards her, pulling another knife out of her cloak.

“Do you _truly_ think I would disarm myself?” she spat, furious, as she approached. “Your treason will be so gravely punished that you will—”

“That I’ll what?” Michael cut in, aware distantly that her voice was incredibly hoarse. “Beg for death?” She bared her teeth, and maybe it was because of the cocktail of pain and desperation vibrating between the atoms of her body, or maybe she really was as similar to her counterpart as Landry seemed to think, but she laughed harshly against it and did not recognize her own voice. “I’ve had _worse_.”

“You insolent—”

Georgiou didn’t get to finish. There was a flash of light from a phaser shot that haloed out from behind her that painted her like some sort of sick deity, and there was Tilly, breathing raggedly, phaser aimed. She must’ve beaten Georgiou’s guard. “Hurry,” she said.

“Is she—”

“Stunned.”

“Okay,” Michael whispered and turned back to the spore drive.

Calculations and theories swarmed dizzily through her head, and she dragged herself excruciatingly to her feet, pulling out the dagger in her leg with a sharp intake of breath as she did so.

Her head was _swimming_.

Behind her, Lorca was laughing. “My, my, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you weren’t our Cadet Tilly.”

“You don’t know everything,” Tilly shot back. “In fact, you seem pretty stupid to me.”

“That’s cute. That’s adorable. Why don’t you put the phaser down, Sylvia.”

“ _Don’t_ call me that.”

“I’ll even say please.”

“If you take one more step, I swear I’ll—”

“Kill me?” Lorca snorted. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being forced to live in your universe for so long, it’s that y’all Federation pussies are too weak for the responsibility that comes from murder.”

“Maybe,” Tilly agreed, and Michael turned around as something occurred to her, struggling to find a way to verbalize it. Lorca was walking slowly towards them, arrogantly ignoring Tilly’s phaser pointed at him. “Or maybe you’re the weak one.”

“Now, _this_ I’ve gotta hear.”

“Sylvia,” Michael said. “I need him. Right here.”

Lorca’s eyes lit up, but Tilly didn’t falter.

“Let him pass.”

When Lorca was standing before her, Michael made eye contact with Tilly, raising her eyebrows to try to convey her plans. Tilly stared at her in confusion, and Michael was forced to contend with Lorca standing in front of her, stance dangerous and predatory.

“Now, darlin’, have you had a change of heart?”

“Of a sort,” Michael allowed. She looked back at Tilly, feeling her fingers twitch involuntarily. “Sometimes revelations hit you like a _phaser shot_.”

Tilly finally seemed to understand.

Grinning, Lorca whispered, “That kind of sweet talk will get you _everything_.” He took a step towards Michael, and Michael struggled against the impulse to flinch away. “Don’t be afraid.”

And then Tilly shot him.

He collapsed into Michael, instantly dead weight, and Michael refused to think before she shoved him into the spore drive.

She watched him dissolve and watched the machine flare with unwanted energy and watched the excess punch out of it like a series of seismic waves.

“Oh, god,” she said.

“Time to go.”

Michael wavered on her feet, and Tilly caught her by the elbows. “I—I just—”

“Michael,” Tilly whispered fiercely, eyes wide and shining in the light of the imploding spore drive. “We have to _go_.”

Tilly started to lead her away, but Michael was present enough to drag her heels. “ _Georgiou_.”

“I can’t save both of you.”

“You have to save her, then.”

Tilly gaped at her, appalled. “You can’t _seriously_ expect me to—”

Michael pushed away, standing on her own now, and took an unsteady step back. “Please don’t make me force you to do this.”

“Don’t make me _choose_ her because—Michael—I choose you any day. Every day. You can’t—”

“Let me make this very clear,” Michael said. “You can either carry me to the shuttle, or you can carry Georgiou. If I live, all that happens is that when we get back to our universe, I go back to prison. If _she_ lives, she could prevent Captain Burnham from becoming Emperor.”

Tilly stared at her, suddenly furious. “Fuck you,” she said lowly, vehemently. “Fuck you for expecting me to _ever_ think the clear decision is to save _her_.”

Michael blinked at her, surprised. “What?”

“I would rather take _one day with you_ than an overly presumptuous guess at interdimensional security. At least tell me the goddamn truth.”

Michael closed her eyes to ward off the threat of tears. “I can’t let her die again, Sylvia. I just can’t.”

“Well, you’re lucky that you don’t have to, you extraordinarily dramatic, self-sacrificial _dumbass_ ,” Landry’s sudden voice said, and Michael opened her eyes to watch dumbly as Landry stormed into the room. “Come on. We’re standing on a ticking time bomb.”

“You were supposed to—”

“Help you fulfill your death wish?” Landry finished. “Yeah, I know.” She kneeled down and grunted with effort to hoist Georgiou’s unconscious body. “Seemed stupid.”

Michael shook her head, speechless. “But—”

“No time for any of that,” she said. “Tilly, you got her?”

And then suddenly there was an arm around Michael’s waist and nothing was going to her plan, and, even worse, nothing aligned with her expectations for the human condition. Hazily, she looked over, and Tilly was already looking back at her, gaze simultaneously incredibly furious and achingly soft.

“I would never let you do this alone,” she whispered.

Just before she lost consciousness, Michael managed to think that maybe she’d had it all terrifically, horribly, catastrophically wrong.

 

* * *

 

 

Michael woke up to Hugh waving a tricorder in her face.

She sleepily swatted it away and mumbled something about proper tricorder etiquette before remembering the events on the _Charon_.

She sat bolt upright, no longer drowsy.

“What happened?”

“Easy,” Hugh said, putting his hands on her arms and gently guiding her back into a reclining position. “You’re recovering from quite a nasty phaser wound.”

“Hugh, _please_.”

“We’re out of danger, somewhere in empty space. Paul is almost ready to jump back home.”

“He’s okay?”

Hugh made eye contact, and Michael felt so incredibly trapped by it. “Everyone’s okay.”

Michael melted back into the biobed in relief. “Oh. Good.”

Hugh hesitated before taking a step away to scan through the readings on his tricorder. “You’ve got some people who want to say some stuff to you, but maybe I’ll hold off on telling them you’re awake for now.”

“Why?” Michael asked, grimacing at the idea of facing Tilly.

Hugh leveled her with a _look_. “You are in no state for an emotionally taxing confrontation.”

“Oh.”

“Rest. I’ll let you know when I think you’re sufficiently healed for the sorts of conversations headed your way.”

 

* * *

 

 

Landry stopped by in the dead of ship night, but Michael was awake.

“Hey,” she whispered.

“Hey,” Landry said, smiling gently. “They’re making us leave in the morning, but I wanted to say good-bye first. Georgiou’s been sedated the entire time, and I don’t plan on letting that change, so I figured I’d let you know that she will _not_ be stopping by, at the very least.”

“That’s nice of you.”

Landry hesitated before leaning down to drop a kiss on Michael’s forehead, and, somehow, it didn’t feel so shockingly uncharacteristic. She pulled away, but only a little bit, so that her face hovered about a foot above Michael’s. “You remind me so much of her.”

Michael resisted the urge to look away. “We’re the same person.”

Landry was already shaking her head before Michael had finished talking. “Only in name.”

“Make her do good, okay?” Michael whispered, deciding to put Landry’s cryptic words away for now. “Keep her in line.”

“Oh, I plan on it.”

Michael smiled, and it felt like the most genuine expression she’d allowed herself in a long time. She lifted her hand in the _ta’al_. “Live long and prosper, Ellen.”

Landry responded with the Terran salute. “Long live the Emperor.”

And then she was gone.

 

* * *

 

 

Saru visited her at dawn.

“As I understand it, I have much to be grateful for,” he said without preamble.

“Don’t thank me.”

“ _Thank you_ , Michael,” Saru said emphatically. “I thank you because without your actions on the _Charon_ , this universe may have moved to conquer others, likely including ours, not to mention that we may have been ruled by an authoritarian captain, and that the wave of energy caused by the collapse of the other spore drive carried us to a safe location in order to peacefully regroup. You deserve nothing _but_ my gratitude.”

To her utter horror, Michael’s eyes filled with tears. “Saru, I almost—I’ve been so _wrong_ about something so _important_.”

Saru ducked his head. “I believe this would be more relevantly discussed with Cadet Tilly.”

Michael’s breath hitched. “I don’t know if I can face her.”

“Well, I happen to have more faith in you.” He hesitated before patting her comfortingly on the shoulder. “We’ll be jumping back to our world within the hour. It will all be over soon. Rest.”

Michael bowed her head and didn’t watch as he left the room.

 

* * *

 

 

Ash had been sleeping whenever Michael had been awake, but ten minutes after Saru’s departure, he stirred and blinked groggily at his surroundings from behind his containment field.

“Michael?” he mumbled.

“Hi, Ash,” Michael whispered, voice choked.

He smiled at her, dazed, and said, “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me too,” Michael said, and for the first time, she really meant it.

 

* * *

 

 

Michael woke up after a brief nap to see Tilly sitting in a chair by her biobed, clutching _Alice in Wonderland_.

She felt like a coward as she watched Tilly read and said nothing.

“We’re about to go back home,” Tilly finally whispered, not looking up.

Michael’s chest squeezed. “And you’re here with me?”

Very slowly, Tilly marked her place and closed the book, eyes sliding up to lock with hers. “Where else would I be?”

There were a million answers to that, but none of them came out of Michael’s mouth, and it felt like the final tug of resistance collapsing against the inevitable yank of logic.

Tilly smiled slightly. “Well, then that’s that.”

“I don’t…”

Tilly took a deep breath and leaned forward, putting one hand on the biobed achingly close to hers. “You can’t invent suicide missions out of thin air for yourself like that again, Michael.”

Michael swallowed roughly, trying to find the words for a response that would make sense. Finally, she said, “I’m trying to get better. I’ve _been_ trying. It’s like—” Frustrated with herself, she waved a hand through the air. “All things die a little bit when they try to better themselves.”

“You don’t have to take that so literally.”

“I know,” Michael allowed. “I’ve been—I’ve been wrong about some things—some important things.”

At last, Tilly shifted her hand so that their fingers brushed. “Like what?”

Michael took a deep breath, gathering herself. “Maybe I’m not meant to exist alone.”

“’Meant to’ has nothing to do with it. Being alone or not alone is a choice, and honestly, you’re the only one who can make it.” Tilly smiled, and it was a sad, crumbling thing. “Talk to me when you’ve decided,” she said, starting to withdraw.

Michael grabbed her hand before she could fully lean away. “I don’t want to exist alone,” she said. Her voice did not waver. Her gaze did not falter. Her heart kept beating.

Tilly’s expression flickered. “Yeah?” she breathed.

“Yeah,” Michael said. She tugged lightly on Tilly’s wrist, and she collapsed into her like the pull had been a massive cosmic force instead of a feeble human constriction of muscle. They kissed almost like an accident, the only points of contact between them their lips and clasped hands, and it felt not only like an accident but a stuttering discontinuity of universal constants. Michael smiled against it.

The kiss was brief, all told, but Michael felt it trying to chip away the vice around her throat all the same.

Perhaps she’d never stop thinking that she was suffocating, but there was ice in her veins and fire in her heart, and she wasn’t going to let something as trivial as _breathing_ get in the way of her existence.


	6. Part III: Red Giants

The trek back through the tunnels to the surface was a silent affair. Sylvia’s feet ached with all the unprotected walking, and she cursed the Sronks for the millionth time for not providing shoes of any sort.

At least they lit the way, she thought sourly, stubbing her toe on a sharp rock and biting back a hiss.

Meanwhile, Michael kept pace without flinching. She was clearly limping but still deigned to put weight on her broken leg to continue walking. Sylvia kind of hated her for it. She had not looked in her direction or spoken to her once since they’d come out of the sync.

Up ahead, they saw daylight. Sylvia dragged a foot across the ground, beginning to really feel her exhaustion. God, she wanted to get off of this planet as fast as possible. There was nothing for her here.

The group came to a natural stop at the base of the enormous rock tree, and Sylvia sat down on a root-looking thing to wipe some of the dirt out of her various scrapes.

Michael did not sit down. She stared at the cloud of sparkles for a long moment. Sylvia watched the sparkles, too, but she must have blinked in the second they shifted back into the Oth Squad.

“We will heal your injuries when we reach our city. We do not have the rightful supplies with us here,” Oth said to Michael.

“Thank you,” Michael said, voice kind, and Sylvia looked away.

“Then, we will address the real reason you came here.” Oth nodded sagely to itself. “We apologize for the Tholo’s uncouth behavior. They do not understand life as we do.”

Sylvia rolled her eyes and got back to her feet. “Do you really not have a mode of transportation between your city and your sacred tree thing?”

“We do not often find the need to travel,” Oth said. “You must find us very strange.”

Sylvia forced a grin that she did not feel. “I’ve seen much worse than you guys.”

She recalled her first contact with an amphibious alien species that breathed poison water and refused to participate in negotiations with the Empire due to some bullshit about non-verbal communication and something else—Sylvia had honestly not paid excellent attention to their reasons. The planet was now in a quarantine zone, and the aliens would probably die an impersonal, clinical, decaying death as their resources inevitably ran out in the next several centuries.

She wondered what Michael had done to this planet in their universe.

They began the long walk back to the tent city. Michael followed immediately behind Oth’s party, asking a question every now and then that Sylvia honestly did not have the strength to listen to. She walked in the back of the group, dragging her feet masochistically and just generally sulking.

She had been staring at the ground for a long time in the effort to avoid stepping on sharp shit, and when she bothered glancing up again, the rest of the group was much farther ahead of her than they had any right to be. Michael had a goddamn broken leg, for fuck’s sake, and the Sronks’ stupid flowy robes weren’t exactly conducive to a punishing pace.

Irritated, Sylvia stalked forward at a faster pace, but the gap between them continued to widen. She glanced to the side and saw that even though _she_ was moving and the ground beneath her feet seemed to be moving, the rocky foliage stayed stationary.

“The hell?” she muttered, coming to a stop.

A great rumbling _growl_ resounded from all around her. If she hadn’t known better, she would’ve thought it a mechanical sort of sound, like a starship launching from the atmosphere, Sylvia was far too cynical to let herself believe that the _Discovery_ was somehow getting down here (although maybe Rhys was just dumb enough to try it).

The patch of ground beneath her trembled, and Sylvia dove to the side as it rose up, and up, and up, revealing a massive creature underneath with the face of a saber-tooth tiger and the body of a velociraptor. The entire stretch of its back was designed to look exactly like the ground, complete with vegetation and even some very disgruntled six-winged birds. At closer inspection, it didn’t seem to be the monster’s actual back but a _shell_ , which may explain why it gave the illusion of movement when Sylvia had walked over it—the monster probably spent most of its time inside the shell, and when it rolled, it woke up.

“For fuck’s _sake_.”

She didn’t have her phaser, but some ironic voice in her head mused that it probably wouldn’t have had a huge effect on the monster anyhow, but Sylvia had been trained in the art of murder her whole life.

She got to her feet and beckoned the monster forward. “What’ve you got for me? Strut your stuff, beautiful.”

The monster _was_ admittedly kind of beautiful, in the grotesque sort of way that those televised Klingon death matches were beautiful.

It opened its maw, and Sylvia felt a thrill of adrenaline. _This_ was the shit that she was really good for—none of this _sync your soul_ bullshit.

“Sylvia!” Michael shouted in alarm, and she turned to look and saw that Michael had finally apparently noticed that she’d been left behind, and she was gaping at the monster in shock.

“I got this, babe. Stay low,” Sylvia shouted back, and it was reflexive. It was easy to try to forget everything that had occurred beneath the skin of this world, and it was easy to turn back to the monster and try to taunt its attention away from Michael’s shout.

Unfortunately, the monster’s interest had been piqued by Michael and the Sronks, and it was probably thinking that they would be a lot more of a filling meal than just Sylvia alone, and it started to stomp its way towards them.

“Hey! Nope, look at me, gorgeous,” Sylvia shouted, taking a jogging start after it before leaping to land on its back-shell-thing. The monster growled in what Sylvia imagined was annoyance and snapped its limbs all back into the shell. Sylvia and the shell hit the ground with a teeth-rattling thud. “Good monster,” Sylvia whispered, pleased.

That was, until the monster started to roll forward, and Sylvia hit the ground with a terrible scrape of collision. An instant before the shell could crush her without mercy, two hands grabbed her by the shoulders and yanked her to the side.

Michael stood above her, eyes wide with some unnamed emotion, bloody and beautiful and brilliant. Sylvia stared up at her and said, “You’re a tough bitch to love.”

Michael’s mouth twitched into something that may have been a smile and said, “You’re one to talk.”

The moment was over before it really began. Rocky, as Sylvia had decided to call the monster, emerged from its shell to growl at them.

“This is what it’s all about!” Sylvia shouted, jumping back to her feet, breathlessly pleased with the urgency and the danger of it all. “You and me, fighting monsters.”

Before Sylvia could even think of a wild sketch of a plan of attack, though, she heard a clanging little noise that had Rocky looking up and over at the Sronks. They had all taken out these little cowbell-type mechanisms and were banging them together.

Rocky stared at them, seemingly captivated, and then one of the Sronks did something that made the clangs blend together in a satisfying little riff, and Rocky collapsed, asleep.

Michael and Sylvia gaped.

Oth shrugged, looking unbothered. “The Yiliktes mean no genuine harm. They eat mostly dirt and insects from their shells underground. You just woke this one up. They do not like to be disturbed from sleep.”

“Uh—”

“Come on, then. I expect that running to help did no favors for your leg, Captain Burnham.”

The Sronks turned in unison and started walking again.

Michael and Sylvia exchanged incredulous glances before numbly going to follow, sending disbelieving looks at an apparently _snoring_ Rocky as they went.

“Not all things exist for violence,” Oth said when they drew closer. “It would be, frankly, stupid to assume as much of everything.”

Sylvia frowned. In her experience, life _was_ violence. To be alive was to fight and struggle and claw your way through survival. She had met her fair share of aliens in her career, and although many of them _claimed_ peace, they all fought tooth and nail when it really came down to it.

“Respectfully, bro, you don’t know shit,” she declared.

“Respectfully, ‘ _bro_ ’, your world nurtures violence. Just because you have lived its life does not mean it is the only life that exists.”

Sylvia scowled, ready to fire back with an _awesome_ insult, but Michael said, “What other lives exist?” with such a quiet, almost lost sort of tone than Sylvia instantly abandoned her train of thought.

If Oth had a mouth, Sylvia was sure it would’ve smiled at this. “May you exist well enough to find out,” it murmured, then did this complex gesture that involved swiping its hand down the center of its head and doing a painful-looking twist of the wrist.

In front of her, Sylvia saw Michael hunch her shoulders. She wished she had the words to tell her that it was okay to live a life of violence—it was what their world _demanded_ , and at the end of the day, they were the only ones in present company who had to live there. It was okay to try to belong in the world that made them. That didn’t make them bad people.

But all she did was scoff and say, “Oth, you pretentious whore.”

Oth cast a disapproving look in her direction and shot back, “I merely speak the language of your souls.”

Sylvia laughed. “That’s even _worse_.”

Oth cocked its head knowingly. “Is it?”

“Absolutely.”

The Sronks collectively made this strange tittering tinkle of a sound that may have been their equivalent of laughter. “At the very least, you never get boring, Captain Tilly.”

Sylvia struggled not to beam at that. “ _Thank you_.”

They kept walking.

 

* * *

 

 

Sylvia sat on a boulder outside of the tent where a group of Sronks were apparently healing Michael, frowning at the society working like a stream around her.

She glared at her gross dirt-and-blood-caked feet and stewed in mild irritation and severe aching loss. The point of emptiness that had, perhaps, always been right in the center of her sternum was widening like a new red giant, and she felt the devastating isolation of it all spreading throughout her body.

A smaller Sronk that must have been a child fluttered its way over to the base of her boulder and stared at her in the unapologetic way that all children had, seemingly regardless of species.

Sylvia arched an eyebrow, determinedly battling at an instinctive amusement. “Wassup?”

The little Sronk took this as an invitation to climb up the boulder and sit next to her. “I’ve never met an alien before,” it said.

“Really? I’ve met loads of aliens.”

“How many?”

Sylvia winked and whispered secretively, “I lost count.”

“Wow. That’s a lot.”

“It sure is.”

“I want to meet more aliens one day,” the little Sronk said, swinging its little dainty feet. “But we’re not supposed to leave the planet.”

“Hey, if you want to leave, no one’s stopping you.”

“I guess.”

Sylvia felt oddly charmed by this kid and found herself saying, “I’m Sylvia.”

“I’m Kro.”

“Crow?”

“No, _Kro_.”

“Kro.”

“ _Kro_.”

Sylvia grinned. “You’re alright, Kro.”

“I know,” Kro said bluntly. It grabbed Sylvia’s hand and began to tug. “Come eat dinner with me.”

“Okay,” Sylvia said and allowed herself to be dragged along.

As they passed by Oth talking to another Sronk, Oth turned to watch them and said flatly to Sylvia, “Tremble before the inherent violence of the clearly inferior alien species.”

Sylvia scowled. “Oh, shut up.”

 

* * *

 

 

At dawn, Michael and Sylvia were summoned to Oth’s home, which was—shockingly— _another_ tent.

“Why are you such a bigwig around here, anyway?” Sylvia asked so that she wouldn’t have to look at Michael, standing next to her in silence. Any warmth that seemed to have existed between them during the whole Rocky incident had evidently disappeared.

Oth tilted its head. “I am the spiritual leader.”

“I see.”

“You do not, but you do not need to.”

“Well, that’s condescending of you.”

“So you’ve said.”

“What do you want from us, Oth?” Michael cut in, sounding tired and impatient.

Oth nodded at her. “You came here because you seek an interdimensional navigator.”

To be frank, Sylvia had almost forgotten about all that. “Yes,” she said anyway.

“We are an interdimensional people. Although we ground ourselves to this world, we exist in infinite ways across infinite universes, and we see these other existences even if we do not necessarily live them.”

“Of course,” Michael agreed. “I visited your world in our universe. I remember.”

“I expect you do,” Oth said. “I do not believe my soul has ever brushed yours before, but I conferred with my peers last night, and Poldno remembers you.”

“Yes.”

Oth fluttered its limbs a little bit before continuing. “I will gift one of you the Sronk way of existence. It will not be the same. You will only be able to access other worlds when you are properly synced.”

“So that’s what all that is about?” Sylvia muttered, scowling. “Is that why you took me underground?”

“We could have done that ourselves,” Oth said, sounding absolutely offended. “We would have just been more polite about it.”

Sylvia laughed. “Right.”

“The Tholos only began your syncs. One of you is much farther from alignment than the other.”

Sylvia stared down at her feet, feeling like she was a reality show contestant on some dumb show called _Who Can Ascribe To Some Arbitrary Alien Rules The Best?_

“Captain Burnham, your sync will be a long and intensive road that you honestly do not have the time to embark upon before you must go back to your world. Your counterparts are almost ready to come home.”

Michael carefully did not react. “Of course.”

Oth turned to her. “Captain Tilly, your sync is almost settled. Your body and soul nearly agree. If you have no objections, I will make you navigator.”

“ _I’m_ the well-adjusted one?” Sylvia demanded, shocked. “Jesus, Michael, your whole shady double agent thing must be way more expansive than what I saw.”

Michael glared at her. “Leave it alone.”

Sylvia ignored her. “Hit me with that hella interdimensional voodoo shit, my man.”

Oth’s nostrils flared, but it didn’t comment on her language. It turned around to grab a rocky goblet and handed it to her. “Drink.”

“All I have to do is drink this and I’ll be one of you?”

“And establish a definite sync,” Oth added, sounding irritated. “Have you been listening?”

“Yeah, man.” Sylvia stared down into the goblet. The drink was a goopy substance of golden sparkly shit that sorta reminded her of the disembodied Sronks. “What is it?” she asked suspiciously.

“You probably do not wish to know.”

Oh, but Sylvia could guess. She grimaced and didn’t think before upending the goblet and chugging it like a shot of liquor. She coughed. “Goddamn, that’s nasty.”

“Yes,” Oth agreed. “You will only be able to navigate once you have completed sync.”

“I _know_.”

“Now, respectfully, bro, get off my planet.”

 

* * *

 

 

When they miraculously materialized on the _Discovery’s_ transporter, Sylvia let out an explosive sigh of relief and turned to face their chief transporter tech. “God, Randy, I could kiss you.”

Randy glanced at Michael in alarm. “Sir—”

“Excellent work, man. You’re getting a fucking commendation at the end of all of this.”

Randy blinked a few times before ducking his head. “Thank you, sir.”

Rhys stood before the transporter pad, one eyebrow arched. “What are you wearing?” he said, tone judgmental as hell.

“Not my choice. Shut your mouth.” Sylvia jumped off the transporter pad and basked in the familiar glow of her ship for a moment, more relieved than she had ever been to see it. “I clearly need to go change and gather myself together if anyone on this ship is going to take me seriously. Commander Rhys, do you think you can handle the conn for twenty more minutes?”

Rhys worked to smother a smile. “I think I can do that, Captain.”

“Great!”

Michael stepped off the transporter pad and silently followed behind Sylvia, expression blank. The Sronks had deigned to allow her to remain in uniform, so Sylvia was the only one who got melodramatic double-takes as she passed by her crew.

After a satisfying sonic shower, Sylvia wrangled her hair back into submission and donned her uniform, feeling like she was coming home.

Michael sat on the floor by their floor-to-ceiling window, staring out at space.

Sylvia debated whether or not she wanted to talk to her for a long while before she said, “I’ve gotta go take care of the crew. I’ll see you tonight.”

Michael turned to look at her, eyes haunted. “And we’ll talk,” she said, and it sounded like the walls of her throat had been scraped off.

Sylvia didn’t bother hiding her grimace. “I suppose.”

Michael turned back to look at the window, forehead resting against the glass. “It’s so bright here,” she murmured.

“Hurts my eyes,” Sylvia agreed.

“I like it,” Michael whispered like a confession, and Sylvia had no idea what to say to that, so she left.

 

* * *

 

 

Sylvia sat in her chair and looked around at her crew dutifully following her through the cosmos. A yeoman with unsteady hands spilled coffee on the floor, and Rhys snapped angrily at him but did not hit him, and Sylvia felt like the world had split her open like an oyster, and it wouldn’t stop until she was broken in half.

Maybe Rhys had a point in being more honest about what made the _Discovery_ so different from the rest of Starfleet. Maybe hiding her love for her crew made her just as bad as the captain before her. Maybe there was even a way to exist in her world without violence.

She rubbed her eyes. This stupid hippie universe was making her weird.

“Wassup, _Discovery_?” Sylvia said, opening a communication to the whole ship. “Tomorrow morning, we’re getting out of this universe. I’m going to be honest with all of you—there’s a chance that it’s going to go wrong, but I dunno. I’ve got a good feeling about this. You have eight hours to submit complaints and concerns. I will address all of them. Tilly out.”

Rhys stared at her for a long moment before approaching her chair. “The hell was that?” he whispered.

Sylvia shrugged. “Maybe you were right about being more open with the crew.”

Rhys shook his head in wonder. “What happened on that planet?”

Sylvia looked out at the too-bright stars and thought of red giants. “Nothing good.”

 

* * *

 

 

She found Michael reclining on the sofa in their quarters, watching a Federation cooking show on her PADD. Michael turned it off when Sylvia sat next to her to take off her boots and chest plate.

“Long day?”

“It wasn’t so bad.”

Michael took a fortifying breath and delicately placed the PADD on the coffee table before them. “You care for your crew a great deal.”

Sylvia nodded. “They’re my family.”

“Would you kill me if I threatened to expose you?”

Sylvia ran a hand through her hair. “Yes.”

When Michael turned to her, her gaze was cold, and her posture was perfect. “When we go back to our universe, I am going to become Emperor.”

Sylvia pursed her lips. “I was afraid of that.”

“I do not need your support, but I need you to not try to stop me.”

They stared each other down, both sort of evaluating how far the other would go to hide the secrets that lived with them. “I can work with that,” Sylvia finally said.

“Then, your crew is safe.”

It felt authentic enough to fix this with threats, but Sylvia was thinking about the sync, and about how everyone on this ship depended on her soul being one with her body or whatever, and she said, “Help me understand.”

Michael blinked in surprise. “I am going to be Emperor because I am the only one who may be able to change things.”

“Change things _how_?”

“Vulcan is more my home than San Francisco has ever been. Amanda took me in when Georgiou decided that being a mother was too much work. I have no loyalty to the Terrans.”

“Just Amanda?”

Michael looked away. “No. I’m something separate from everyone else. I have to be. Even Amanda knows that when it comes down to it, I’d pick my survival over hers.”

Sylvia frowned. “That’s a hard way to live.”

“It is the only way I know how to live.”

“Why marry?” Sylvia demanded, feeling overly clinical about the whole thing. “Why go along with everything for so long?”

Michael sat, quiet, for a breath of a moment, and Sylvia felt like that expanding point of emptiness within her would collapse and explode.

“My greatest failure,” Michael said softly, “is that I could never fully hate you—the Terrans.”

“Georgiou,” Sylvia supplied.

“My mother. And you,” Michael whispered, eyes darting up to hers and back down. “My love, I would kill you if you thwarted my plans, but I could never hate you.”

Sylvia’s heart hammered in her chest. “So, that wasn’t a lie?”

Michael shook her head. “The illogic of marriage in my life is inescapable. You have made everything so difficult.” She reached forward, fingertips ghosting over Sylvia’s face. “I wish I could love you and trust you.”

“You have your people and I have mine,” Sylvia whispered. Michael’s Vulcans and Sylvia’s crew stood polar to all the empty commitments they had made to one another.

Michael tilted her head to the side, gaze calculating. “I see.”

“I can live with only your love and leave trust and loyalty and all that bullshit out of the equation if you can do the same for me.”

Michael leaned forward to press a closed-mouth kiss to her lips. “I can work with that.”

 

* * *

 

 

In the anxious too-bright dawn, Michael and Sylvia stared at the spore drive in mutual silence, and Michael reached out to grab Sylvia’s hand.

“Do you think you’re ready?” Michael asked, not looking at her.

Sylvia shrugged, but she knew that she was. It was a feeling deep in her gut that she was stretched out so much farther beyond this point, and if she let her eyes flutter, she could see into places that were not the engineering deck of a starship.

Somehow, she’d synced.

Sylvia slowly extracted her hand from Michael’s and threw her a sad smile. “If this shit kills me, don’t mourn.”

Michael winked. “I think I’ll do exactly what I want.”

“God, you’re more of a curse than a blessing, babe.”

Stepping up to the spore drive, Sylvia finally turned around, her back to Michael, her focus forward as it always would be, and no fucking angel of the damned was going to distract her from that.

She pressed a hand flat against the barrier between her and the spore drive and said, “Let me in.” The barrier broke, and she stepped inside, knowing that she could take this ship exactly where it needed to be.

“Engage,” Sylvia said, and the machine began to hum.

She had worlds to conquer.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me at my disco tumblr, [michaelburnhamfanclub](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/michaelburnhamfanclub).


End file.
